Louis Braille, the inventor of the raised-dot system of writing used by blind people around the world, was born on January 4, 1809. Braille, and the writing system that bears his name, gave millions of blind people access to literacy – and gave the world access to the written works of blind writers.
The Tack-Maker’s Son Goes To Paris
At 3 years old, Braille lost one eye in a tragic example of why small children shouldn’t be allowed to be play with sharp tools. The resulting infection took away vision in his other eye shortly after. Fortunately, Braille was a bright, resilient kid with supportive parents – unusually so, for the time. He carried on with an active childhood, navigating village streets and paths around his family’s land using a cane his father made for him. And he quickly proved to be a brilliant student.
10-year-old Braille left behind his small hometown in 1819, bound for Paris. He’d been accepted as a student at the Royal Institution for Blind Youth (now the National Institution for Blind Youth).
Its textbooks were printed on heavy paper with raised, embossed letters that blind students could trace with their fingers – a system invented by the school’s founder, Valentin Haüy.
The system was better than nothing, but not by very much. It meant that blind students like Braille could learn to read, but not to write – at least not for themselves or other blind people. Printing the embossed letters required a whole printing press, so it offered no way for students to take notes that they could study later, or write letters that other blind people could read without help from a sighted person. And because the special books were so expensive to make, the school had only a few at a time, and they were typically shorter and simpler than normally-printed textbooks.
Braille chafed at the shortage of reading and study material. But everything changed in his second year at the Royal Institution, when the brilliant young student met a former artillery officer named Charles Barbier de la Serre.
A Soldier Of The Ancien Regime Returns to France
After his stint in the French Royal Army from 1784 to 1792 (he wisely left the country during the turbulent years of the French Revolution), Barbier had become very interested in literacy. He wanted to make it easier for people – including the blind – to learn to read and write, and he thought the best solution was to offer them a simpler writing system.
Barbier tinkered with several options over the years, ranging from shorthand to a phonetic alphabet. Eventually, he developed a system that arranged letters in a grid. Each letter would be represented by two numbers, which in turn could be written as two rows of dots. By counting the dots, a person could read the numbers and then convert them to the right letter. It was a bit clunky, but it meant that a blind person could read the raised dots by feel – and then make impressions on a piece of paper, which another blind person could read the same way.
An apocryphal version of the story – which seems to have been invented by a 19th-century biographer – claims that Barbier developed his system of raised dots for soldiers on the front lines to covertly exchange notes under cover of darkness. It’s a compelling story but not a true one, according to Barbier, who wrote in his autobiography that he’d invented the system for the blind all along.
He brought his grids and dots to the Royal Institution in 1821, and one of the first students to learn it was the then 12-year-old Braille.
Braille immediately realized the potential Barbier’s system offered, but he also saw room for improvement. He took the idea and ran with it, essentially, and spent the next several years developing a simpler, more flexible version of Barbier’s raised-dot alphabet. The writing system that thousands of people still use today – and millions more relied on before the advent of smartphones – began as a teenage boy’s school project.
He finished by 1824, but had to wait until 1829 to actually publish the first edition of what’s now known as braille. But the version he published in 1837 is the one still used today: neat arrangements of between 1 and 6 dots to represent each letter. It even included notations for music, since Braille was an accomplished cellist and organist as well as a star student and a language developer.
Hidebound Academics Eventually Give In
Fewer people use braille today than just a few decades ago, thanks to the availability of other technologies, like screen-readers, voice-to-text software, and smartphones. Until fairly recently, however, braille was how blind people in most of the world read and wrote; it was adopted in the U.S. in 1916. But Braille never lived to witness how his innovation changed the world.
Haüy and his ideas held sway over the Royal Institution for years after his death, and one of Haüy’s most firmly-held beliefs was that blind students should be taught, as much as possible, just like sighted students were taught. Large, embossed letters were familiar to sighted people, and Haüy equated that similarity with academic credibility. He didn’t entirely trust Braille and Barbier’s newfangled dots.
That hidebound attitude lived on after Haüy’s death in 1822. In fact, the first edition of Braille’s 1829 book was printed in Haüy’s raised letters. And Haüy’s successors in the administration of the Royal Institution once fired a professor for translating a history book into braille.
The Royal Institution finally adopted braille in 1854 – two year’s after Braille’s death.
The Rest Of The Story
Despite academic politics, the Royal Institution had become Braille’s home and his life’s work. Braille stayed on at the Royal Institution as a teaching assistant once he graduated, and in 1833 he became a full-fledged professor of algebra, geometry, and history. He also served as organist at two large Parisian churches. Braille and Barbier exchanged letters until Barbier’s death in 1841.
Braille spent the last 16 years of his life struggling with a chronic respiratory illness, which was probably tuberculosis. He died in the Royal Institution’s infirmary two days after his 43rd birthday in 1852.
