Louis Braille (1809-1852)

Louis Braille invented a system of writing for the blind, using raised dots that are read by the touch of fingers.

Braille was born on 4 January 1809 at Coupyray, near Paris. He was blinded at the age of three while playing with the tools in his father's harness shop. His early education, in a class of sighted pupils, depended mostly on his memory of the lectures heard. In 1819, he went to Paris to attend the "National Institute for Blind Children", and from 1926 he taught there. The founder of the Institute had developed texts with large raised lettering. These texts were inconvenient but allowed the blind at last to read.

Braille became interested in a system of writing, exhibited at the school by Charles Barbier, an army officer, in which a message coded in dots was embossed on cardboard. The code used raised dots and dashes, an improvement over raised letters but too complex and inconvenient for the blind to use.

When Braille was only fifteen years old, he improved the method, by reducing the height of the symbols and simplifying them. He worked out an adaptation, written with a simple instrument, that met the needs of the sightless.

The Braille system is based on a set of six dots that are arranged in sixty-three patterns by omitting one or more of the dots. These are used to form letters and numbers as well as diphthongs and a few simple words. He published treatises on his type system in 1829 and 1837. He also devised notations for music and for mathematics and continued to improve it throughout his life. Suffering with tuberculosis he died on 6 January 1852.

Braille's system was immediately accepted and used by his fellow students, but wider acceptance was slow to come. A universal Braille code for the English-speaking world was adopted in 1932, when representatives from agencies for the blind in Great Britain and the United States met in London and agreed upon a system known as standard English Braille, Grade 2. Today, a standard Braille system for all English-speaking people is in use, thus bringing light into the lives of the sightless.