In 1819, 10-year-old Louis Braille became the youngest student ever admitted to the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. Eager to learn how to read and write, Braille was crushed to learn that the school’s library contained just three books.
That’s because the only system at the time for printing books for the blind was embossed lettering. Printers would carve wooden blocks into the shape of each letter (reversed) and press them into thick sheets of wax paper, resulting in rows of large raised print. With training, a young blind person could learn to read the embossed letters with their fingers, but the printing process was so labor-intensive and expensive that very few books were made.
Years later, Braille recounted his first impression as a gifted young blind student confronted with the prospect of being locked out of the world of knowledge and discovery.
“If my eyes will not tell me about men and events, ideas and doctrines, I must find another way,” said Braille. “If I cannot discover a way to read and write, to understand life about me and life from the past, then I shall kill myself.”
With inspiration and effort, Louis Braille devised a simple and elegant system that allowed the blind and visually impaired to read quickly and almost effortlessly. And he did it all before his 16th birthday.
A Terrible Accident
Louis Braille was born in 1809 in the French village of Coupvray outside of Paris. He was the youngest of his parents' four children, born healthy and with full sight.
Braille’s father, Simone-René, was a harnessmaker by trade. As an inquisitive toddler, young Louis would sit by his father in his workshop playing with scraps of leather. One day, while Simone-René was speaking with a client, 3-year-old Louis grabbed an awl from his father’s workbench. Mimicking his father, Louis tried to push the sharp, pointed tool through a piece of leather, but his hand slipped.
The awl punctured young Louis Braille’s left eye. The best the village doctors could do was apply herbal salves, but the deep wound quickly became infected. Even worse, the infection soon spread from Braille’s left eye to his right.
“When will morning come?” young Braille cried as his vision slowly faded into darkness.
A Rare Opportunity to Learn
In the early 19th century, most blind people didn’t have much hope for leading a fulfilling life. People with disabilities were routinely institutionalized, forced to act as “comic” entertainment or left to panhandle on the streets.
Louis Braille was blessed with a loving family who treated him like the rest of their children. Braille attended the village school, played musical instruments and did chores around the house. Simone-René taught his blind son the alphabet by nailing round-topped nails into a board in the shape of the letters. Braille reproduced them by shaping pieces of straw.
At school, it was clear that Braille was exceptionally bright. Even without sight, he outperformed all of his classmates. The village schoolmaster encouraged Braille’s parents to apply for a spot at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth, the first school for the blind in the entire world. That’s how Braille won a scholarship to attend the Institute at just 10 years old.
The Limitations of Embossed Print
The Royal Institute for Blind Youth was founded in 1784 by Valentin Haüy, a young French educator who was appalled by a street performance mocking the blind. Haüy began with one student, a blind beggar named Francois Lesueur.
To teach Lesueur how to read, Haüy made wooden blocks with each letter of the alphabet and assembled them into words on a rack. By accident, Haüy discovered that Lesueur could also make out the indentations on the reverse side of printed pages.
That gave Haüy the idea of printing larger embossed letters using sheets of wax paper. Through trial and error, Haüy stumbled onto the first primitive system for teaching blind students how to read. And that’s the system that Braille encountered when he arrived at the Royal Institute in 1819.
When Braille finally got his hands on the school’s three embossed-letter books, he was deeply disappointed. The process of deciphering the large raised letters was so slow that—even with his remarkable memory—Braille would often forget the words from the beginning of a sentence before he got to the end.
“I can’t imagine how anyone could read fluently with embossed print,” says Arielle Silverman, director of research at the American Foundation for the Blind. “The letters are a lot bigger than your fingertips. When I read braille, I can take in a whole line of text in a couple of seconds.”
Captain Barbier's Raised-Dot System
Young Braille was intent on finding a way to read and write with the fluency of sighted people. Inspiration arrived in 1821, when a retired French Army captain came to visit the Royal Institute.
Captain Charles Barbier served under King Louis XVIII and spent time in the Signal Corps. Barbier devised a secret language for military communication that was rejected by the Army, but he thought it might revolutionize reading and writing for the blind.
On the battlefield, any sound or flicker of light could alert the enemy to your position. Barbier called his system “night writing” because it could be written and deciphered in complete silence and total darkness.
Barbier’s “night writing” system used raised dots punched into paper that could be read with the fingers. The symbols were made using grids of two horizontal spaces and six vertical spaces (12 spaces total). The number and orientation of the dots in each grid determined the sound the symbol made. Words were spelled phonetically rather than letter by letter.
When Barbier presented his system to the school, 12-year-old Braille was blown away. The raised dots were so much easier and faster to decipher than embossed print. But the more young Braille experimented with the system, the more its flaws began to emerge.
A 12-dot grid was too big, Braille decided, because it required as many as 100 dots for a single word. And because each symbol represented a phonetic sound, not a letter, then blind students would never learn how to spell correctly. Barbier’s system also excluded symbols for punctuation marks, numbers or musical notation. How would blind students learn higher math or write music?
Braille's 'Simple and Elegant' Solution
Equally inspired and frustrated by Barbier’s “night-writing” method, Braille sat down with Barbier’s tools—a pointed stylus and a special ruler with spaces arranged in grids—and tried to improve the system.
For the next three years, Braille spent every free minute at the Royal Institute tinkering with his own version of Barbier’s raised-dot writing system.
Braille’s first major improvement was to cut the size of the grid in half: two spaces across and three down for a total of six spaces. Next, each symbol in Braille’s system represented a letter of the alphabet, not a sound. Letters A through J were created by different combinations of the first four spaces at the top of the grid. For letters K through T, the dot patterns were repeated in the same order with the addition of a single lower dot. Letters U through Z followed suit, but now with two dots on the lower line.
Each letter pattern represented a number when a special number symbol preceded it. There was punctuation, too!
“It’s so simple and elegant,” says Silverman, who is blind. “There are only 64 possible combinations of braille dots. The simplicity means that it's easy to learn, it’s easy to emboss and it’s standardized. That provides so many advantages in terms of learning and becoming literate, but also in terms of production.”
Braille Demonstrates His System at Age 15
In the fall of 1824, when Braille was 15 years old, he presented his raised-dot system to the headmaster of the Royal Institute, Dr. Alexandre René Pignier. Braille sat poised with his stylus, ruler and paper while Pignier read aloud from a long article.
“You can go faster,” young Braille said, his stylus bouncing across the page. A decade later, Braille was timed at a Paris exhibition punching 2,500 dots per minute.
When Pignier finished reading the article, Braille flipped back to the start of his writing, ran his fingertips across the raised dots and recited the entire text verbatim. Pignier was floored.
The headmaster immediately began teaching Braille’s raised-dot system at the Royal Institute and wrote to the French interior minister recommending adoption of Braille’s technique nationwide. The recommendation was ignored.
At 19, Braille became the first blind professor at the Royal Institute and finally published his raised-dot system in a book titled Method of Writing Words, Music and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them.
Braille Eventually Adopted World-Wide
Braille’s revolutionary six-dot system was not adopted outside of the Royal Institute during his lifetime. In 1852, Braille died from tuberculosis at just 43 years old.
It would take nearly a century for the world to fully adopt braille as the official writing system for the blind and visually impaired. After long fights over alternative systems like New York Point, the English-speaking world finalized a uniform braille code in 1932.
“I don't remember a time when I didn’t know how to read braille,” says Silverman, author of Just Human: The Quest for Disability Wisdom, Respect, and Inclusion. “Louis Braille is probably one of my top three role models and inspirations of all time. The work that he did—not just for his own benefit, but for the benefit of countless generations of blind and low vision individuals—it really was unparalleled.”
In 1952, the French government moved Louis Braille’s remains from the humble Coupvray cemetery to the Pantheon in Paris, where France’s greatest heroes are buried. (At the request of the citizens of Coupvray, Braille’s hands remain in a small urn kept in the village.) In a celebration marking the 100th anniversary of Braille’s death, Helen Keller addressed a gathering of international dignitaries.
“We the blind are as indebted to Louis Braille as mankind is to Gutenberg,” said Keller. “The raised letters under our fingers are precious pods from which has sprouted our intellectual wealth. Without a dot system, what a chaotic, inadequate affair our education would be!”
