LOUIS BRAILLE
Louis Braille was a French educator and inventor of a system of
reading and writing for use by the blind or visually impaired. His
system remains known worldwide simply as braille.
Louis
Braille invented a system of raised dots that enables blind people to read and
write. His system is the globally accepted code for those with visual
impairments.
Synopsis
Louis
Braille was born on January 4, 1809 in Coupvray, France. The son of a
harness-maker, Braille was blinded by an accident when he was three. Educated
at the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, Braille developed a
raised-dot code that enabled blind people to read and write. Although his
system was in limited use during his lifetime, it has since been accepted
globally. Louis Braille died in 1852.
Early Life and Education
Louis
Braille was born on January 4, 1809, in Coupvray, France, the fourth child of
Simon-René and Monique Braille. Simon-René Braille made harnesses,
saddles and other horse tack.
When Braille was
three years old, he injured one of his eyes with an awl (a sharp tool used
to make holes in leather). Both his eyes eventually became infected, and by the
time Braille was five, he was completely blind. Although there were few options
for blind people at that time, Braille's parents wanted their
son to be educated. He attended school in their village and learned by
listening. An attentive student, when he was 10 years old, he received a scholarship
to attend the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris.
The
National Institute was the first school of its kind, founded by Valentin Haüy
to educate blind students. At the school, Louis learned both academic and
vocational skills. He also met Charles Barbier, who while serving In the French
army, invented a code that used different combinations of 12 raised dots to
represent different sounds. Barbier called the system sonography. Those who
could not see would decode the dots by touching them. Its purpose had been for
soldiers to communicate silently at night, but since it did not succeed as a
military tool, Barbier thought the system might be useful for blind
individuals.
Educator and Inventor
Louis
Braille was one of many people at the school who found Barbier’s system
promising; but he also discovered its shortcomings. It was quite complex
(soldiers had had difficulty learning it) and it was based on sounds rather
than letters. Braille spent three years—from ages 12 to 15—developing a much simpler
system. His system had only six dots — three dots lined up in
each of two columns. He assigned different combinations of dots to
different letters and punctuation marks, with a total of 64 symbols.
Did you
know?
Helen
Keller said of Louis Braille, "In our way, we, the blind, are as indebted
to Louis Braille as mankind is to Gutenberg."
In 1829,
Louis Braille published Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs by
Means of Dots for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them. He became an
apprentice teacher at the National Institute for Blind Youth when he was 19,
and then a teacher when he was 24. In 1837, the school published the first book
in braille. However, Braille’s system proved to be controversial at the
institute. The school’s director, Alexandre François-René Pignier, had
supported using braille, but Pierre-Armand Dufau banned it when he became
director of the school in 1840. Nonetheless, by 1850, when tuberculosis forced
Louis Braille to retire from teaching, his six-dot method was well on its way
to widespread acceptance.
Louis
Braille died of his illness on January 6, 1852, in Paris, France, at the age of
43.
Clancy's comment: Yet another clever man died early.
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