Louis Braille
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| Louis Braille | |
 Louis Braille |
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| Born | January 04, 1809 Coupvray, France |
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| Died | January 06, 1852 (aged 43) Paris, France |
Louis Braille (January 4, 1809 – January 6, 1852) was the inventor of braille[1], a world-wide system used by blind and visually impaired people for reading and writing. Braille is read by passing the fingers over characters made up of an arrangement of one to six embossed points. It has been adapted to almost every known language, except Asian languages based on characters. He was also blind.
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[edit] Biography
Louis Braille was born in Coupvray near Paris, France, but he spent most of his childhood in Lisle. His father, Simon-René Braille, was a harness and saddle maker. At the age of three, Braille injured his left eye with a stitching awl from his father's bedroom. This destroyed his left eye, and sympathetic ophthalmia may have led to loss of vision in his right - he was completely blind by the age of six. Sometimes he would ask his parents things like, "Why is it always dark?" Despite his disability, Braille continued to attend school, with the support of his parents, until he was required to read and write.
At the very young age of ten, Braille earned a scholarship to the Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles (Royal Institution for Blind Youth) in Paris, one of the first of its kind in the world. The scholarship was his ticket out of the usual fate for the blind, begging for money on the streets of Paris. However, the conditions in the school were not notably better. Braille was served stale bread and water, and students were sometimes abused or locked up as a form of punishment.
Braille, a bright and creative student, became a talented cellist and organist in his time at the school, playing the organ for churches all over the country of France.
At the school, the children were taught basic craftsman's skills and simple trades. They were also taught how to read by feeling raised letters (a system devised by the school's founder, Valentin Haüy). However, because the raised letters were made using paper pressed against copper wire, the students never learned to write. Another disadvantage to these raised letters is that the letters weighed a lot and whenever people published books using this system, they put together a book with multiple stories in one in order to save money. This made the books sometimes weigh over a hundred pounds.
In 1821, Charles Barbier, a former soldier, visited the school. Barbier shared his invention called "synography" a code of 12 raised dots and a number of dashes that let soldiers share top-secret information on the battlefield without having to speak. Although the code was too difficult for the average soldier, Braille picked it up quickly.
The same year Louis began inventing his raised-dot system with his father's stitching awl, finishing at age 15. His system used only six dots and corresponded to letters, whereas Barbier's used 12 dots corresponding to sounds. The six-dot system allowed the recognition of letters with a single fingertip apprehending all the dots at once, requiring no movement or repositioning which slowed recognition in systems requiring more dots. These dots consisted of patterns in order to keep the system easy to learn. The Braille system also offered numerous benefits over Haüy's raised letter method, the most notable being the ability to both read and write an alphabet. Another very notable benefit is that because they were dots just slightly raised, there was a significant difference in make up.
Braille later extended his system to include notation for mathematics and music. The first book in braille was published in 1827 under the title Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them. In 1839 Braille published details of a method he had developed for communication with sighted people, using patterns of dots to approximate the shape of printed symbols. Braille and his friend Pierre Foucault went on to develop a machine to speed up the somewhat cumbersome system.
Braille became a well-respected teacher at the Institute. Although he was admired and respected by his pupils, his braille system was not taught at the Institute during his lifetime. The air at the institute was foul and he died in Paris of tuberculosis in 1852 at the age of 43; his body was disinterred in 1952 (the centenary of his death) and honored with re-interment in the Panthéon in Paris.
[edit] Legacy
The significance of the braille system was not identified until 1868, sixteen years after Louis Braille died, when Dr Thomas Rhodes Armitage and a group of four blind men and one woman established the British and Foreign Society for Improving the Embossed Literature of the Blind (later the Royal National Institute of the Blind), which published books in Braille's system.
Braille has been adapted to almost every major national language and is the primary system of written communication for visually impaired persons around the world.
The asteroid 9969 Braille was named in honor of him.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ To prevent confusion the proper noun "Braille" is written in lower case ("braille") when referring to the writing system.
[edit] External links
- Louis Braille Biography - American Foundation for the Blind
- The Life of Louis Braille - Royal National Institute for the Blind
- Biography of Louis Braille
- Louis Braille : Text of his system (1839 original, in French)
- A braille alphabet card
- Pamela Lorimer (1996), Historical analysis and critical evaluation of braille
- Biography 'Louis Braille: A Touch of Genius' from National Braille Press
- Article on Louis Braille at Encyclopedia Britannica
