Braille Born: Inventor Who Gave the Blind Literacy

He blinded himself at three, playing with an awl in his father's harness workshop in Coupvray, France. An infection spread to both eyes. By five, Louis Braille was completely blind. At ten, he got a scholarship to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris, one of the first schools of its kind anywhere. The school taught reading through raised Roman letters pressed into paper, a slow and clumsy method that required tracing each letter by touch. Students could read this way, laboriously, but could not write. At fifteen, a visiting artillery captain named Charles Barbier demonstrated a military communication system called "night writing," designed so soldiers could read battlefield orders in the dark using patterns of raised dots. Barbier's system used twelve dots per cell and encoded sounds rather than letters, making it needlessly complex. Braille spent three years redesigning it from scratch. He simplified the cell to six dots, mapped it directly to the alphabet, and created a system elegant enough that a practiced reader could move as fast as a sighted person reading print. He finished his alphabet at eighteen. The Royal Institution refused to teach it. The director, Alexandre-Francois-Rene Pignier, was eventually replaced by a successor who actively suppressed the dot system, considering it a threat to institutional authority. Students taught it to each other in secret. Braille himself continued working at the school as a teacher, playing organ at a nearby church, and refining his system to handle mathematics and music notation. He developed tuberculosis in his twenties and spent his remaining years in declining health. He died on January 6, 1852, at 43. France didn't adopt his alphabet as the official method for teaching blind students until 1854, two years after his death. Today the system is used in virtually every language on earth.