Louis Braille, keeping the blind in touch
It is humbling to think that a blind person was able to develop what even the military couldn’t master — a truly international writing system.
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Louis Braille, the Frenchman who dedicated his short life to giving the blind and partially sighted their own system of self-expression.
http://www.nationalbrailleweek.org/
Louis grew up in the village of Coupvray near Paris and was blinded at the age of three after an accident in the workshop of his father, who was a saddler at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Louis had crept into the workshop to play but ended up slipping and piercing his eye with a cobbler’s awl, a sharp tool used to make holes in leather. Some time later the other eye became infected and his sight was lost.
He attended the village school with his sighted friends for the next two years but it became clear that he would not learn much more, largely because he couldn’t read or write. Without an education it was likely he would have to beg on the streets, like other blind people at that time.
At the age of ten he was lucky enough to be sent to a school for blind boys in Paris, the first of its kind in the world, although conditions there were harsh. The building was damp and unhealthy and discipline was severe. Pupils who misbehaved were beaten, locked up and given stale bread and water. It was a cruel era when most sighted children left school at the age of 12 to work in factories or mines.
According to UK charity the Royal National Institute for the Blind, such pupils were taught practical skills like chair caning and slipper making to prepare them for work. Their recreation would be a walk in the park, linked together by a long rope. They were taught the difficult task of reading standard letters raised above the surface of the page, which were made by pressing copper wire into one side of the paper. They were unable to write a single word for themselves.
Louis was 12 when a soldier named Charles Barbier visited the school, bringing with him a system he had invented called sonography or “night writing”. This had been designed for soldiers to pass messages along World War I trenches at night without having to talk and give their positions away. Twelve raised dots could be combined to represent different sounds, but this proved too complex for soldiers to master and it was rejected by the army.
Over the next three years Louis experimented and developed his own system using six dots. He eventually produced separate codes for mathematics and music and in 1827 the first book in Braille was published.
Louis eventually became a teacher in the school where he had been a student but did not live to see his system widely adopted. He died from tuberculosis in 1852 at the age of 43.
In France, his achievement was finally recognised and a century later his body was moved to Paris where it was buried in the Pantheon, the resting place of national heroes.
Tags: 200th anniversary, bicentenary, bicentennial, Braille, Louis Braille, writing
Categories:
history, language, writing
