Year: Day to Day Men: January 4th

Red and White Squares

Born on January 4th of 1809, Louis Braille was a French educator and inventor. He was the youngest of four siblings bor  to Simon-René and Monique Braille who maintained a successful enterprise for leather goods and horse tack. At the age of three, Louis Braille was playing with his father’s  tools in the workshop; an awl that he was using slipped and penetrated one of his eyes. No treatment was able to save the damaged organ and eventually lost sight in the other eye by the age of five, most likely due to sympathetic ophthalmia.  

Braille was raised by his parents in a normal fashion and prospered in their care. He navigated the village and paths with canes fashioned by his father. Braille’s intelligence and creative mind impress the local teachers and priests who assisted him with higher education. In February 1819 at the age of ten, he  entered Paris’s Royal Institute for Blind Youth which provided a stable environment for blind children to associate and learn. There the students were taught to read by a system devised by the school’s founder Valentin Haüy. The books in the small library used embossed heavy paper with raised imprints of Latin letters which could be traced with fingers.

These books however were in uncomfortable sizes and weights, fragile and expensive to obtain. While the blind children could read the letters by touch, there was no process by which the children could write by themselves. Louis Braille read Haüy’s books repeatedly and was attentive to the oral instructions offered by the school. After he exhausted the school’s curriculum, he was asked to remain as a teacher’s aide and, by 1833, was elevated to a full professorship. For the rest of his life, Braille stayed at the Institute and taught history, geometry and algebra. 

In 1821, Braille discovered a system devised by Charles Barbier, a code of up to twelve dots in two columns, impressed into thick paper. These impressions could be read entirely by the fingers. Inspired, Braille developed a system of his own, a system of  reading and writing that could bridge the gap in communication between the sighted and the blind. His system was largely completed in 1824, when he was fifteen years old. Braille’s first version, published in 1829,  used both dots and dashes in uniform columns of six dots for each letter. In 1837, he discarded the dashes as too difficult to read; the resulting small cells were capable of being recognized as letters with a single touch of a finger. Braille’s system was later extended to include braille musical notation.

Louis Braille published several written books on braille and educational books for the blind. In 1939, he created the decapoint, a systematic method of dot-punching with a specialized grill which overlaid the paper. With the use of an associated number table, which he devised, the grill permitted a blind writer to faithfully reproduce the standard alphabet. With the assistance of his friend Pierre-François-Victor Foucault, Braille helped develop the Raphigraphe, a device that could emboss letters in the manner of a typewriter. 

Although respected by his pupils, Braille’s writing system was not taught at the Institute during his lifetime. The successors of Haüy who died in 1822 were hostile to its use. Suffering through sixteen years with a persistent respiratory illness believed now to be tuberculosis, Braille relinquished his teacher position at the age of forty. He was eventually admitted to the infirmary at the Royal Institution when his condition reached mortal danger. He died in January of 1852, two days after he reached forty-three years. Due to the insistence of the blind students, Braille’s system was finally adopted by the Institute in 1854, two years after his death.