Louis Braille (1809 - 1852) was a French educator and inventor who created braille, the system of raised dots that enables blind and visually impaired people to read and write by touch. [1] Blinded in an accident during early childhood, he devised the code as a teenager at the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris, adapting a military method of night writing into a compact six-dot cell. [1] Largely overlooked in his lifetime, braille was adopted internationally after his death and remains the standard tactile script. [2]
Early life
Louis Braille was born on 4 January 1809 in Coupvray, a village east of Paris, where his father worked as a leather craftsman. [1] At the age of three he injured an eye with an awl in his father's workshop; the wound became infected and the infection spread to both eyes, leaving him completely blind by about the age of five. [1] Despite the loss of his sight he attended the local school and showed a quick intelligence that led his family and teachers to seek further education for him. [3]
Education in Paris
In 1819 Braille won a place at the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris, one of the first schools of its kind. [1] Pupils there learned to read using books with large embossed letters, a slow and cumbersome method that made writing all but impossible. [2] Braille excelled at his studies and also developed considerable musical talent, later earning a living as an organist in Parisian churches. [1]
Invention of braille
The turning point came when Charles Barbier, a former army officer, presented the school with a system of raised dots and dashes he had devised for soldiers to read messages at night without light. [1] Braille recognised the promise of tactile dots but found Barbier's grid too large to feel in a single touch. Working through his teens, he simplified it into a cell of at most six dots that could be perceived with a single fingertip, assigning combinations to letters, punctuation and, later, mathematical symbols and music. [1] He published the system in 1829 and issued a revised edition in 1837. [2]
Later life and death
Braille remained at the institution as a respected teacher, though officials were slow to embrace his code, and for a time its use in the school was even discouraged. [1] His health declined from tuberculosis, and he died in Paris on 6 January 1852, two days after his forty-third birthday. [1] Braille was formally adopted by the Paris institution shortly afterward and spread rapidly across France and beyond. [2]
Legacy
Braille's system became the international standard for tactile reading and has been adapted to dozens of languages and to specialised notations for music, mathematics and science. [2] In 1952, on the centenary of his death, his remains were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris in recognition of his contribution to humanity. [1] His name, written in lower case, has become the ordinary word for the script he created. [3]
