A blind schoolboy shrank a twelve-dot code into braille's six-dot cell
Blinded after an accident with an awl in his father's workshop, Louis Braille found the school's embossed-letter books slow, heavy and impossible to write with. Borrowing Charles Barbier's twelve-dot code, he cut it to six dots that a single fingertip could read. The system is still used worldwide almost unchanged.
Braille was born on 4 January 1809 in Coupvray, a small town roughly twenty miles east of Paris, the youngest of four children of a harness and saddle maker. At three he was trying to punch leather with an awl when it slipped into his eye. The wound became infected, the other eye failed too, probably from sympathetic ophthalmia, and by five he was completely blind. His parents raised him unusually normally; his father carved canes so he could walk the village lanes.
In February 1819 he left for the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, one of the first such schools anywhere. Its founder, Valentin Haüy, had made books of raised Latin letters on heavy paper. They proved touch could work, but they were fragile, costly and hard to read, and when the school opened it owned three. Pupils could not produce them, so they could not write.
In 1821 an inventor named Charles Barbier wrote to the school with a code of up to twelve raised dots in two columns. Braille simplified it into uniform cells of at most six dots, small enough to sense in one touch. His first version, published in 1829, also used dashes, which he dropped in 1837 because they were hard to feel. He extended the scheme to music, drawing on his own skill as a cellist and organist, and later devised decapoint, a grid method that let blind people write letters sighted readers could follow.
He became a full professor at the institute in 1833 and taught history, geometry and algebra. Support was not steady: the principal Alexandre-René Pignier backed the system, but his successor Pierre-Armand Dufau opposed it after forcing Pignier out in 1840. It returned to the classroom in 1844. A long respiratory illness, long assumed to be tuberculosis, made him give up teaching by 40, and he died in 1852, two days after his 43rd birthday.
Source: Louis Braille
