The Boy Who Gave the Blind Books

The workshop smelled of leather and wax. Long straps hung from hooks on the walls, and the bench was covered with knives, needles and sharp little tools for punching holes. It was the most interesting room in the house, and the three-year-old boy loved it.

His name was Louis Braille. He was born on 4 January 1809 in Coupvray, a small village east of Paris, where his father, Simon-René, made harnesses and saddles for the farmers' horses.

One day in 1812, while his father was busy, Louis climbed onto the bench and picked up an awl, a pointed tool for piercing leather. He tried to push it into a piece of leather, just as he had seen his father do. The tool slipped and struck him in the eye.

Darkness

The local doctors did what little they could, but there were no antibiotics then. An infection set in, and it spread to his other eye. By the time Louis was about five years old, he was completely blind.

His family refused to let him sit in a corner. His father carved him a cane so he could find his way along the village lanes. The village priest and the schoolmaster saw that he was bright, and let him sit in the classroom with the other children. Louis could not read the books, but he listened, and he remembered almost everything.

Still, a blind child who could not read had very few choices in life. Many blind people in France at that time ended up begging in the streets.

The heavy books

In 1819, when Louis was ten, he won a place at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, one of the first schools for blind children in the world.

The school had books, but they were strange ones. Each letter was pressed into thick paper as a large raised shape, so that it could be traced with a finger. The books were enormous and heavy, and there were only a handful of them. Reading one was painfully slow: by the time you had felt your way to the end of a long sentence, you might have forgotten how it began. And there was no way at all for a blind pupil to write something down and read it back.

Louis was hungry to read. The system made him feel he was looking at the world through a keyhole.

Night writing

In 1821, a former army captain named Charles Barbier visited the school. He had invented a code of raised dots and dashes punched into paper, which could be read by touch, without any light. He called it "night writing". The story often told is that he hoped soldiers might use something like it to pass messages in the dark.

The pupils tried it eagerly. Dots, they found, were much easier to feel than the curly outlines of letters. But Barbier's system was clumsy. It stood for sounds rather than spelling, it had no punctuation or numbers, and some of its symbols used as many as twelve dots, too many to cover with one fingertip.

Louis, who was twelve, could not stop thinking about it. If dots worked, why not make them simpler?

Six dots

For the next three years, he worked on the problem in every spare hour: in the evenings, at weekends, and on holidays at home in Coupvray. He used a blunt tool called a stylus to press dots into paper, then turned the sheet over to feel them.

At last he arrived at something beautiful in its simplicity. Every letter would fit into a small cell of just six dots, arranged in two columns of three, like the six on a domino. By raising different dots in the cell, he could make sixty-three different patterns, enough for every letter, accented letters, punctuation marks and numbers. And because each cell was small enough to sit under a single fingertip, a reader could glide along a line, almost as a sighted person's eyes glide across print.

He was about fifteen years old when he finished the first version.

In 1829 he published a short book explaining his system. It also included a way of writing music, which mattered to him a great deal, because he was a fine organist and cellist who played in Paris churches.

Not yet

The pupils at the Institute loved the new code. They used it to take notes, write letters to one another and copy out books. Louis stayed on at the school as a teacher, and he was known as kind and patient with his students.

But many of the sighted adults in charge were not convinced. Some felt that blind people should read the same letter shapes as everyone else. For years the dots were not officially taught, and at times the school discouraged them, so pupils learned them from each other.

Louis did not live to see his idea win. He had suffered from tuberculosis for many years, and he died on 6 January 1852, two days after his forty-third birthday.

Two years later, in 1854, the Institute officially adopted his system. From there it slowly spread across Europe and then across the world, adapted for language after language, including Hindi, Tamil, Arabic and Chinese.

Today braille appears on lift buttons, medicine boxes, banknotes and signs, and blind readers use it on electronic displays that raise and lower tiny pins. In 1952, a hundred years after his death, France moved Louis Braille's remains to the Panthéon in Paris, where the nation honours its great citizens. His hands were left behind in Coupvray, kept in the village where his story began.

Want to read more?

Russell Freedman's Out of Darkness is a short, warm biography written for younger readers. C. Michael Mellor's Louis Braille: A Touch of Genius is a fuller account, with pictures of the early braille books and documents.