1809–1852 
TEACHER AND INVENTOR FRANCE
The blind can now work, they can study, they can sing, they can add their share to the good and happiness in the world. And it was Louis Braille . . . who found the golden key to unlock their prison door.
—HELEN KELLER, ADVOCATE FOR THE BLIND AND DEAF
The instructor tapped on his desk, calling the reading class to order. But this was no ordinary reading class. The embossed books used by the French Royal Institute for Blind Youth in 1819 were so special that the school owned just fourteen of them. This was ten-year-old Louis’s first day in class, and he was thrilled: he would finally be able to read on his own!
Embossed books for the blind had been invented thirty years earlier. To make them, large letters were pressed into thick sheets of waxed paper, leaving impressions. Then, when the page was turned over, a blind person could read the letters by tracing their outlines with a finger. The only problem was, each page could hold just a few sentences, so the books were big and fat. You couldn’t even hold one; it had to be propped up on an easel.
Today Louis Braille rests in the Pantheon in Paris, the burial place of France’s greatest heroes.
Still . . . it was reading, and after the seven years of darkness since he’d lost his sight, Louis was excited. But his excitement soon turned to disappointment. Louis found that tracing each letter with his finger took so long that by the time he got to the end of a sentence, he couldn’t remember what it said at the beginning. Even if he could remember what he was reading, what good did it do? In all of France, there were just a handful of embossed books. They were too expensive to print and too big to store.
There must be a better way, Louis thought. For years the problem occupied his mind, and it ultimately evolved into the greatest gift to blind people that has ever been invented: braille, a reading system named for the boy who invented it. Without braille, the blind would never know the joys of losing themselves in a good novel or even reading sports scores—the daily tasks that sighted people take for granted.
Louis Braille lost his sight at age three, when he accidentally poked his eye with a tool in his father’s harness-making shop in Coupvray, a small village twenty-five miles from Paris. The eye became infected, and when little Louis rubbed it, he accidentally spread the infection to the other eye as well. Within weeks of the accident, he was totally blind in both eyes.
When Louis first experimented with sonography, he eagerly discussed his ideas with Captain Barbier. Barbier was not pleased to have his design questioned—especially by a kid! He insisted that it could not be changed. Good thing Louis didn’t listen to him!
His father made him a cane that allowed him to explore his physical surroundings, but the cane could only take him so far into the world. His blindness left him isolated: he couldn’t play games, run through the woods, or climb trees with the other children. And two hundred years ago, the blind were thought to be mentally handicapped. People figured that if a person couldn’t see, he or she couldn’t think either. Blind people weren’t welcome in schools or taught any trade or skill. If you were blind in Europe back then, you’d probably end up a beggar on the streets.
Luckily, the village priest in Coupvray saw Louis for what he was: a normal boy who happened to be blind. Father Jacques Palluy taught Louis and convinced the schoolmaster to accept him as a pupil. As if to make up for his lack of vision, Louis’s memory was phenomenal, and he learned rapidly—so rapidly that Father Jacques was able to get him into the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris.
eBraille is now being developed. It’s a web-based system to transcribe and deliver any web page or computer file into braille to users anywhere.
At the school Louis read his first books and acquired skills that would allow him to support himself. When he was thirteen, the institute had an important visitor, a man who would change Louis’s life. Charles Barbier was a retired captain in the French army who had invented a military code based on dots and dashes punched with a stylus (a sharply pointed, pen-like tool) into strips of cardboard. The code allowed field commanders to silently give orders like “Advance” or “Withdraw” at night. When it occurred to Barbier that blind people might find it useful, he expanded his code so each word was broken into sounds and each sound was a different combination of dots and dashes. He called it sonography, or sound-writing.
Sonography looked complicated, but the school’s director agreed to try it with the students. Louis became a sonography expert, but the more he learned about it, the more problems he found: since the symbols represented sounds, there was no way to show spelling, punctuation, or numbers. And many of the symbols were too big to read with the single touch of a finger. Sonography was so hard to use, many blind students gave up.
Louis didn’t give up but began experimenting with sonography. From age thirteen to fifteen, his days were filled with classes and friends, but at night and on weekends he created patterns of dots, trying to find an easier system. Some nights, Louis lost track of time; as he sat on his bed punching dots, the rumbling of wagons outside told him that morning had come. His passion took a toll on his health, and he developed tuberculosis.
Then one night, as his classmates snored away, a brainwave hit Louis: the sounds were the problem. He had been stuck trying to work within Barbier’s system when it was the system itself that was wrong. Instead of representing sounds, Louis created symbols that stood for the letters of the alphabet. Just like the alphabet sighted people use. His code was made up of six dots, like this:
This code unit, called the braille cell, has space for six dots: two across and three down. For each letter of the alphabet, mark of punctuation, symbol, and number, Louis worked out a different arrangement of dots. Here’s how his first name looks in braille:
Every letter and symbol could fit within the space of a fingertip. When he demonstrated his invention for the school’s director, Dr. Pignier, he asked him to read aloud a paragraph from any book: “Read slowly and distinctly, as if you were reading to a sighted friend who was writing down your words.” As Pignier read, Louis punched holes with his stylus onto a sheet of paper. It was so easy to do that he told Dr. Pignier, “You can read faster.” Pignier finished reading and Louis finished “writing” at almost the same time. Then, as the amazed director watched, Louis turned the paper over and read, with his fingertips, the raised bumps his stylus had left—every word Dr. Pignier had dictated. The man was overwhelmed with emotion. He knew what this meant: a fifteen-year-old boy had just switched on the light of learning for blind people forevermore.
During the next few years, Louis improved and added to his system. At twenty, his system perfected, he wrote a book explaining it, called Methods of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Song by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged by Them. The braille system solved the main problems of the earlier embossed books. Since braille letters could fit under a person’s fingertip, it was possible to read much faster. Braille letters took up about the same space as printed letters, so the books weren’t so huge and expensive to produce. And best of all, because braille was like the regular alphabet that sighted people used, it was easy to learn.
At the school for the blind, Louis also learned to play musical instruments. He was so good that for the rest of his life he earned a living playing music in Paris churches.
Despite Dr. Pignier’s enthusiasm, government officials were slow to change. They didn’t want to give up their old embossed letter system and asked, “Why should blind people learn a different alphabet than the rest of us?” Obviously, they never had to read their embossed books! When Louis’s school got a new director, even he refused to use braille. But so many students were smuggling styluses into the school and teaching one another braille, the new director had to give in.
Louis stayed at the institute his entire life, teaching and playing music. When tuberculosis overtook him at forty-three, his last words were, “I am convinced that my mission on earth is finished.”
Imagine a life without reading: no internet, no computer games, no Harry Potter. Thanks to the invention of a teenage boy, millions of blind people only have to imagine that kind of a life. . . . They don’t have to live it. Thanks to Louis, they can open a book, anytime, and read whatever they want. The horrible accident that blinded Louis Braille also gave him the will to create one of mankind’s most humanitarian inventions.