NOTEWORTHY INVENTORS:
LOUIS BRAILLE
Since January is Braille Literacy Month, it seems like a good time for Tidbits to focus on Louis Braille, the inventor of the system of reading and writing for the blind. • Growing up in France in the early 1800s, Louis Braille was the son of a leather tanner and maker of horse tack. The young Louis loved playing in his father’s workshop and watching his father work. When he was three, Louis was playing with some of the tools, imitating his father making holes in a piece of leather with an awl. As the boy pressed down to drive the point in, the sharp awl bounced back and struck his eye. Louis’ parents rushed him to a local doctor, who bathed the inflamed eye in lily water and patched it. The next day he was taken to a renowned surgeon in Paris, who was unable to save the damaged eye. Severe infection spread into the wound, which then spread into Louis’ good eye, and the child became completely blind. • Due to the undying devotion of his parents, Louis was raised in a normal fashion, learning to read and write by feeling nails hammered into boards in the shapes of letters. He found his way around his French community without assistance aided by a wooden cane carved by his father. • In 1819, at age 10, Louis was enrolled in one of the world’s first schools for blind children, Paris’ Institute for Blind Youth. At the Institute, children were taught a method of reading developed by the school’s founder, Valentin Hauy, which used a technique of embossing heavy paper with raised imprints of Latin letters.
Tell ‘Em You Saw Their Ad in Tidbits! Advertisers make Tidbits possible
• When Braille was 12 years old, a French Army captain, Charles Barbier, visited the Institute. Barbier had devised a writing system of dots and dashes impressed into thick paper for use by soldiers on the battlefield for a code they could read without needing light and without speaking. Braille was inspired by the cryptography and began working on his own technique, a simpler version of the military’s complex system. Braille used a six-dot cell rather than the 12 dots and series of dashes used by Barbier. Braille had perfected his embossed dot system by the time he was just 15 years old. He published it five years later. • Braille had an ear for music as well and created a system of musical notations entitled Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them. Braille himself was an accomplished cellist and organist, and throughout his later years, he played the organ in churches across France, as well as holding the position of organist at a Paris cathedral. • At age 24, Braille was hired by the Paris Institute for Blind Youth as a full-time professor. Here he spent most of the remainder of his life teaching history, geometry, and algebra. He was determined to improve communication between the blind and the sighted, and devised a system called Decapoint which used a set of 100 dots with a grid on a board with heavy paper and a stylus. He then progressed to the invention of a machine that could type out the dot formations, called a raphigraphe, which translates “needle-writer.” • Braille had been a sickly child and his weaknesses followed him into adulthood. At age 40, he was so ill with tuberculosis, he was forced to resign his professorship, and at age 43, he passed away from the illness.
Tidbits of Grand Forks/ East Grand Forks is Locally Owned and Operated.