The Accident That Left A Boy Blind, Also Gave Blinds The Gift Of Reading - Louis Braille

The braille writing system was invented by a blind man. Braille is a reading system for people who can not see. If this is of interest keep on reading. This is a story of Louis Braille

Louis Braille was born on January 4, 1809, in Coupvray, France. His dad was a harness-maker. Louis injured his eye at 3, on a sharp tool at his dad’s shop. Unfortunately, his eye could not recover and he went blind from one eye. The infection spread onto his other eye and by 5 he was completely blind. Can you imagine a child who could see at birth, and then at 5 his world goes in darkness.

This was the 1800’s, blindness was seen as a disease and people who couldn’t see were not able to pursue a career, they were rarely thought a trade or skill, his blindness left him isolated, he could not play with other kids.

At the age of 10, Louis had his first reading class at the French Royal Institute for the blind. He was about to read an embossed book. An embossed book was a book read by people who couldn’t see using a figure. Unlike other books, embossed books were huge, they only had few sentences and were heavy. Carrying them around was not the easiest. Regardless, Louis was excited that after 5 years of complete darkness, he was about to read his first book.

The school only had few books and Louis soon knew them all. As much as he loved reading, it took forever for him to finish a book. At times he would reach the end but forgot what was in the beginning. By now, the school had a visitor, Charles Barbier, who was a retired captain in the French army. Barbier had invented a military code, his code allowed soldiers to give silent orders at night, the code was called the sonography. The system combined 12 dots to represent sounds. Barbier believed his invention could be of great value to the blind.

Amazed by this, Louis started to learn the new system. He became an expert on sonography but the more he learned the more problem he found, the symbols representing sounds but did not show spelling, punctuation, or numbers. Sonography was hard, many students gave up on it.

Frustrated, Louis went on a mission to find a better solution. Louis would work at night and weekends, trying to find an easier solution. He would lose track of the time as he sat on his bed punching. The rambling of wagons outside told him that it was morning. His willingness to find a solution took a toll on his health, and he started seeing symptoms of tuberculosis.

Wanting to come up with a better solution Louis kept on working, he remembered playing a dice game. Remembering that every side of the dice is flat and the dots on the dice can be felt by a fingertip, he began to develop a system using that method. It took him 4 years to come up with a system made up of six dots. Where every letter and symbol could be felt with a figure tip, every pattern represented an alphabet.

He approached the school director Pignier and asked him to read a paragraph from a book and Louis started punching holes. After a while, Pignier finished reading and Louis had written the entire paragraph on a piece of paper. Louis at 15 had just turned on the light of learning for the blind. However this was not the final version, he kept improving his system and at age 20 his system perfected. He wrote a book explaining the system and called it “New Method for Representing by Dots, the Form of Letters: The 1839 Brochure

The new system of Braille letter, took about the same space as a printed letter so the books were not expensive to produce. Pignier did his best to promote the new system to government officials but they did not see the importance of the new system. Officials felt that the system would require special training for the blinds and would further isolate them. However, the students at the school started teaching each other Braille’s system.

He stayed at The Institute his entire life teaching. In 1852 at 43, Louis Braille died in Paris due to tuberculosis. His last words were “I’m convinced that my mission on Earth is finished”. In 1854 two years after his death, his system was officially introduced in schools for the blind in France. In 1878 Louis Braille system was declared the official international writing system for the blind at the congress in Paris.

For years he suffered from his blindness but came up with a solution, that would help people after him. Louis didn’t live to see the breakthrough of his invention, thanks to his system, millions of blind can open and read whatever they want, an accident that left a boy blind also give the blinds a gift of reading.