Background
Louis Braille was born in 1809 in Coupvray, France, a small town about twenty miles east of Paris. His father made leather saddles and harnesses for farmers in the area. He had three elder siblings.
Louis Braille was born in 1809 in Coupvray, France, a small town about twenty miles east of Paris. His father made leather saddles and harnesses for farmers in the area. He had three elder siblings.
Louis was an excellent student, mostly because of his exceptional memory. In 1819 Braille received a scholarship to the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles (National Institute of Blind Youth). The fifteen-year-old Braille was inspired by a lecture Captain Charles Barbier gave at the Institute a few years later.
In Louis's initial study, Braille had experimented with geometric shapes cut from leather as well as with nails and tacks hammered into boards. He finally settled on a fingertip-sized six-dot code, based on the twenty-five letters of the alphabet, which could be recognized with a single contact of one digit. By varying the number and placement of dots, he coded letters, punctuation, numbers, diphthongs, familiar words, scientific symbols, mathematical and musical notation, and capitalization. With the right hand, the reader touched individual dots and, with the left, moved on toward the next line, comprehending as smoothly and rapidly as sighted readers.
At the age of twenty, Braille published a monograph describing the use of his coded system. In 1837, he issued a second publication featuring an expanded system of coding text. Despite the students' favorable response to the Braille code, sighted instructors and school board members, fearing for their jobs should the number of well-educated blind individuals increase, opposed his system. The Braille writing system-though demonstrated at the Paris Exposition of Industry in 1834 and praised by King Louis-Philippe - was not fully accepted until 1854, two years after the inventor's death.
By 1833, Louis was elevated to a full professorship. For much of the rest of his life, Braille stayed at the Institute where he taught history, geometry, and algebra. He grew seriously ill with incurable tuberculosis (a lung infection) in 1835 and was forced to resign his teaching post. Braille held the position of organist in Paris at the Church of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs from 1834 to 1839, and later at the Church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. He died in 1852, two days after he had reached the age of forty-three.
Braille designed the coding system, based on patterns of raised dots, by which the blind can read through touch. His system remains virtually unchanged to this day, and only after his death it became known worldwide simply as braille. His famous publications: Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs... , New Method for Representing by Dots the Form of Letters, Maps, Geometric Figures, Musical Symbols, etc., for Use by the Blind. The Encyclopedia Britannica lists him among the "100 Most Influential Inventors Of All Time".
He was a devout Catholic.
Quotations: In his own words: "Access to communication in the widest sense is access to knowledge, and that is vitally important for us if we (the blind) are not to go on being despised or patronized by condescending sighted people. We do not need pity, nor do we need to be reminded we are vulnerable. We must be treated as equals – and communication is the way this can be brought about."
Blinded in both eyes as a result of an early childhood accident, Braille mastered his disability while still a boy.
Captain Charles Barbier invented sonography, or nightwriting, a system of embossed symbols used by soldiers to communicate silently at night on the battlefield.
