Just imagine, a little boy your age, sitting down on his bed, the moon shining down on his pale, tiny little face. He was just of the verge of creating the brand new alphabet that all blind people around the world would use at one point or another. He is sitting up and working with his thick paper and stylus. This all happened to a little boy by the name of Louis Braille.

In 1812, Louis Braille became blind at the age of three, when he was trying to cut leather with an awl in his father's saddle shop a couple miles out of Paris, France. But, the awl slipped and went into his eye. Soon, the doctor told him and his family that Louis had an infection in his eye. A few days later, Louis started to complain that his other eye was stinging. The doctor came back and reported that he would soon become blind.

Seven years later, on February 15, 1819, his family sent him off to the National Institute for Blind Children where he then surpassed his classmates and began to play the piano and the organ. At age 15, Louis completes his first dot alphabet by getting up in the middle of the night and working on his invention, but then falling asleep during class! Louis wanted to work by himself, not with other people, but alone. Some characteristics that enabled him to invent Braille were that he was blind, he was determined, and he didn't want to read the big books that the school gave to their students.

For use in writing his system, he had device Barbier had used to write sonography- a grooved slate to hold the paper, and a sliding ruler to guide the stylus. The ruler was pierced by little windows. By positioning the stylus in these openings, a blind person could punch dots across the page with precession, then slide the ruler down to the next line. The stylus produces depressions on the paper. One must therefore write from right to left and turn over the paper in order to read it.

With this system, Louis swept away all the shortcomings of embossing. The raised- dot characters were simple and complete. They could read quickly with a touch of a finger. They took up little space than conventional printed letters. The Braille system, as it came to be known, made it possible to place all the worlds literature at the fingertips of blind people.

Louis first published the new Braille alphabet in 1829 and revised it in 1837, including all the letters of the French alphabet (W was added later), punctuation, mathematical symbols, and even musical notation was in there. Louis's version of Braille was based on Captain Charles Barbier's invention of sonography.

After Louis graduated from the institute, he decided to become a teacher there. Since he designed the system they use there, he decided to let him be a teacher there. 

Louis started to suffer from tuberculosis after he was forgotten at the institute; Braille was also forgotten. Louis and Braille was reintroduced in 1854, 2 years after Braille's death. Louis Braille was ( and is still there) buried in The Pantheon in Paris, France. Some lessons we could learn from Louis is that if you're determined to do something, then you can do it!


Research and Web Page created by Ma'ayan

Works Cited:
Davidson, Margaret Louis Braille- the Boy Who Invented Books for the Blind .Scholastic Inc. 1971
Freedman, Russell. Out of Darkness .Houghton Miffilin Company 1997
Lantier, Patricia Louis Braille .Gareth Stevens Children's Books 1952
Woodhouse, Jayne Louis Braille. Heinmann Interactive Library 1952