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Louis Braille was born on January 4, 1809 in Coupvray, a small French village 25 miles east of Paris.
Louis
was the fourth child of Simon-René Braille and Monique Baron.
Simon-René was a master harness maker who was respected throughout the
Coupvray region for his craftsmanship as a maker of high-quality leather
goods for horses. His success as a craftsman helped Louis' father to
purchase land, farm buildings, and a vineyard in Coupvray and to provide
a comfortable life for his family.
Coupvary: Louis' Childhood Home
| Accident in the Workshop
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One day when Louis was 3 years old and was playing in his father's
workshop, he picked up a sharp awl and tried to make a hole in a piece
of leather as he had seen his father do many times. The young child
lost control of the tool and stabbed himself in his right eye, crying
out in pain. When his parents reached him, his eye was streaming blood.
A local remedy of lily water was applied to the injury, probably
aggravating the already badly inflamed eye. The infection spread quickly
to Louis' left eye. Both eyes continued to deteriorate and by the time
Louis was 5 years old he was completely blind.
Coupvary:Louis' Childhood Home
| An Independent Louis
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Braille's parents were determined that Louis should be
educated to become independent — a remarkable expectation at a time when
many blind people in rural France lived by begging or peddling. Both
Simon-René and Monique Braille could read and write and they recognized
the importance of education for the intelligent child. Louis was taught
to read and write by feeling nails hammered into boards in the shapes
of letters. His father also carved a wooden cane for Louis so that he
could learn to navigate his home and village without assistance.
Louis began his formal education in 1815 when he received private
lessons from the new village priest, Abbé Palluy. The priest soon
recognized that the young boy was fully capable of a normal education
regardless of his lack of vision. The following year, Louis was admitted
to the town school, where he received instruction side by side with his
sighted peers. He quickly showed himself to be one of the brightest
pupils in the school.
Coupvary: Louis' Childhood Home
| Louis' Education
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Louis had to memorize what he learned when he received
instruction from Abbé Palluy and the local school teacher, Antoine
Becheret. In 1818, when he was 9 years old, Louis' schooling was
disrupted by the government's introduction of a new method of teaching
called "mutual instruction." The method was based on students
instructing one another, thereby reducing the central role of the
teacher in the classroom. Abbé Palluy strongly disliked the new method
and searched for alternative educational options for Louis. He learned
about a school in Paris dedicated to teaching children who were blind,
and with the help of a local nobleman arranged for Louis to attend the
school on scholarship. Louis' parents realized that he needed special
instruction if he was to progress, and, after much soul-searching, they
agreed to send him to the Institute for Blind Youth in Paris.
Paris: Institute for Blind Youth
| Valentin Haüy, the School's Founder
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The school where Louis Braille was to spend the rest of
his life — as both pupil and teacher — was called the Institute for
Blind Youth. The Institute was the first school for blind children
anywhere in the world. It was founded in 1786 by Valentin Haüy, a
pioneer in the education of students who are blind. Haüy was born in
1745, and when he was in his twenties, he witnessed an incident where
blind people were ridiculed and made fun. A clever and compassionate
man, he became interested in education for those who were blind. He was
particularly dedicated to developing a way to teach reading and writing.
Through experimentation Haüy developed a revolutionary process for
embossing books — books that had raised bumps in the form of letters.
In June 1784, Haüy asked a 17-year-old boy who was blind, named
François Le Sueur, to study with him and offered to pay him as much as
he was earning through begging. In only three months he taught François
to read and write using embossed books. Over the next few years he was
able to raise money to open a school, where the curriculum focused on
academics, music, and manual skills.
In 1801, the Institute for Blind Youth was merged with another famous institute for blind people, and Haüy resigned.
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Paris:Institute for Blind Youth
| Arrival at the Institute for Blind Youth
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Louis Braille was only 10 when he traveled to Paris with his father on
February 15, 1819, to enroll at the Institute for Blind Youth. Although
a trip from Coupvray by stagecoach took only four hours, it was to be a
life-changing journey for Louis. He was greeted kindly by Sébastien
Guillié, the school's director.
Despite the sometimes harsh conditions of school life, Louis loved
attending the Institute for Blind Youth. The school had been at its
present location since 1816, and although the living conditions at this
school were far better than at its previous location, it was filthy and
damp. Students with no vision found it hard to walk about the poorly
kept building, which was over 200 years old. The building had been
used, among other things, as a prison during the French Revolution.
When Louis arrived at the school, there were 60 boys and 30 girls. He
became friends early on with Gabriel Gauthier, who remained a close
friend for the rest of his life. Louis particularly enjoyed weekly
outings to the botanical gardens, when each child would hold onto a rope
that kept the group together as the children walked through the city
streets.
Paris: Institute for Blind Youth
| The School Curriculum
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The school's director, Guillié, was one of only three
teachers for ninety pupils at the Institute. All the teachers were
sighted. Under Guillié's system, the brighter pupils instructed other
students. Much of the work done by the students was through
memorization, as it had been for Louis in Coupvray. The lessons included
Greek, Latin, algebra, and French grammar. Students were also taught
practical skills designed to help them find work, such as chair caning,
making slippers, and basket making.
Louis was an excellent student. Between the ages of 11 and 16, he
won prizes in several academic subjects as well as in the cello and
piano. Louis' considerable musical talent flourished at the Institute,
and he found work as an accomplished organist when he was older.
Braille Invents His Code
| Louis Perfects His System
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In 1821, shortly after becoming the Institute's new
director, Dr. Alexandre François-René Pignier invited Charles Barbier to
address his students. Barbier was an artillery captain in the French
Army who had devised a system for soldiers to communicate at night
without a sound. His system combined 12 dots to represent sounds and he
called it sonography. It is also referred to as "night writing." He
believed his invention could be of great value to the blind.
Both students and teachers at the Institute were intrigued by the
promise of sonography, and, despite the difficulty of the system,
sonography was introduced in the school as an auxiliary teaching method.
Louis and his classmates soon identified one of the chief flaws of
Barbier's system in addition to its complexity: it was based on the 36
sounds of the French alphabet and did not lend itself to spelling or
punctuation. Louis determined to take Barbier's system and improve upon
it.
Between the ages of 13 and 16 Louis worked on perfecting an embossed
dot system. Like Barbier's, Louis' system used raised dots, but beyond
that similarity Louis' ideas were his own. For three years Louis spent
his free time refining his code. On the weekends, evenings, and summer
vacations in Coupvray, Louis could be found with paper, slate, and
stylus diligently working.
When at age 15 he felt he had an adequate code, he shared it with Dr.
Pignier, who had become his mentor. Louis' system, based on a six-dot
cell, was both simple and elegant. A full braille cell consists of six
raised dots arranged in two parallel rows, each having three dots.
Sixty-four combinations are possible using one or more of these six
dots. A single cell can be used to represent an alphabet letter, number,
punctuation mark, or even a whole word.
Dr. Pignier encouraged the students at the Institute to use Louis'
code. With it, they were able to achieve a level of literacy previously
unavailable to them.
Braille Invents His Code
| Louis Becomes a Teacher
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When Louis was 19, Dr. Pignier hired him to be an
apprentice teacher at the Institute at a salary of 180 francs per year.
Louis taught several classes including algebra, grammar, and geometry,
to both sighted and blind students. With the appointment to apprentice
teacher, Louis moved out of a dormitory and was provided his own room.
In 1833 at the age of 24, Louis and two other blind friends including
his best friend Gabriel Gauthier, were made full-fledged teachers. For
his work Louis received a salary of 300 francs per year. After 1835,
Louis only provided instruction to blind students. With his salary he
was able to buy himself a piano, lend money to friends who were in need,
and pay people to help write books using his code. In 1834, the
Exposition of Industry was held in Paris, and Louis was permitted to
exhibit his code and demonstrated it to attendees.
Braille Invents His Code
| Books in Braille
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In 1829 the Institute published Louis' book, Method of Writing Words, Music and Plain Songs by Means of Dots for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them.
In it, Louis explained how his code worked to produce letters, words,
punctuation, capitalization, musical notes, and arithmetic symbols. The
book was prepared using embossed type, but examples were provided in
Louis' six-dot code.
In spite of poor health, Louis continued to make changes to his code, and in 1837 he produced a second edition of Method of Writing Words, Music and Plain Songs by Means of Dots for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them, followed in 1838 by Little Synopsis of Arithmetic for Beginners.
In this book he not only describes how to make materials for
mathematics, but he also provides ideas on how to write a textbook using
his code. He recognized the need for uniformity in the production of
textbooks and other material for readers who were blind.
In 1837, the Institute for Blind Youth produced the first full-length book published in braille, A Brief History of France.
A copy of the book, one of only three extant copies, is preserved in
the Rare Book Collection of the American Foundation for the Blind and is
illustrated here.Braille Invents His Code.
| Louis Invents Decapoint
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Louis' genius did not end with the six-dot braille
system. By the late 1830s, he was working on a method whereby people who
were blind could communicate efficiently and swiftly with sighted
people. The system was called Decapoint.
Decapoint utilized a set of 100 dots on a 10 by 10 grid. Each letter was
based on a dot configuration that could be looked up on a table Louis
developed.
The illustration at left shows the letters "a-w" and their numeric
dot-matrix equivalent. The dots in the decapoint alphabet replicate the
shapes of letters; all letters have a minimum height of 4 dots, those
letters that have longer stems such as p or d are accomodated by 3 dots
either vertically above or below the 4 main dots. Using a board with
heavy paper on it and a stylus, the user could trace the dot patterns to
represent letters. The person writing went from right to left. After he
or she finished, the writer would turn the paper over and read from
left to right. The letters could be felt or seen with the eyes.
Louis' next task was to invent a machine that could tap out the dot
formations. He sought assistance from Pierre-François-Victor Foucault, a
mechanic and former pupil of the Insitute, to invent a machine to write
decapoint without having to use a stylus to create every dot. The
result was a machine called a raphigraphe (needle-writer). Foucault's
machine was recognized with a platinum medal in 1843 by the Society for
the Encouragement of National Industry.
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Recognition of the Braille Code
| Changing of the Guard
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On May 7, 1840, Dr. Pignier was forced to retire from the
position of director of the Institute and was succeeded by his former
assistant, Pierre-Armand Dufau. Dufau did not approve of Louis
Braille's code and banned its use by students and teachers at the
Institute. It is said he did not like Louis' code because he was afraid
that there would be no need for sighted teachers if everyone who was
blind could read as a result of using braille.
In April 1843, Louis was forced by ill-health to convalesce for six
months in Coupvray. When he returned to Paris he discovered that Dufau
had burned 73 books produced by Guillié and Pignier using Haüy's
embossing method. The director thought a different embossing system, in
use in the United States and Scotland, was superior to Haüy's system.
The method was called Boston Line Type, and eventually it was found to
be less effective than Louis Braille'code.
| Braille's code Demostration |
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Dufau's aversion to Braille's code and his prohibition on
its use at the Institute were countered by Joseph Guadet, his
assistant, who supported the braille code. Guadet convinced Dufau to
see the benefits of using Louis' code. On February 22, 1844, the
Institute celebrated its move to a new building. During the dedication
ceremony Guadet demonstrated Louis Braille's code. First a 15-page book
entitled Account of the System of Writing in Raised Dots Used for the Blind
was read to those in attendance. This text acknowledged Louis'
accomplishments and outlined the steps in the development of his code.
Next a child was sent out of the room. Another child was asked to use
Louis' code to write poetry dictated by a visitor attending the
celebration. The first child was asked to come back in the room and read
the poetry from the page the second child had created.
The day of the demonstration is often said to be the day Louis
Braille's code, the braille code, was accepted by the world. In 1850,
Dufau acknowledged Braille's invention in a second edition of his book, Concerning the Blind, which had made no mention of Braille's contribution in the original 1837 version.
The Final Years of Louis Braille
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Louis was officially diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1835.
As the tuberculosis progressed, his health continued to deteriorate.
In 1844, he was forced to retire to Coupvray for three years to regain
his strength. When he returned to the Insitute in 1847 he reduced his
class size because it was difficult for students to hear his weakened
voice. Although ill health forced him to retire in 1850, Dufau agreed to
keep him on at the Institute in exchange for giving piano lessons from
time to time as his health allowed.
Louis Braille died on January 6th, 1852, two days after his 43rd
birthday. His body was taken to Coupvray and buried in the local
cemetery. Shortly before his death he dictated his will, in which he
forgave all debts owed to him and gave monies to blindness and Catholic
organizations.
Dissemination of Braille
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After Louis' death in 1852, the braille code, the code he
invented as a teenager, spread throughout the world. In 1878, a
congress met in Paris and officially decided to adopt braille as the
international system used for writing by the blind. However, this did
not put an end to the use of multiple systems of embossed writing. In
the United States, braille was first used in 1854 by the Missouri School
for the Blind, but it took until 1917 for the United States to agree
upon a braille standard. Up until then, competing systems of Boston Line
Type, Moon Type, American Braille, British Braille, and New York Point
were all used.
It was not until 1932 that a uniform code was accepted by English-speaking countries around the world.
France Honors Its Native Son
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Louis' momentous accomplishments on behalf of blind and
visually impaired people were not fully recognized until many years
after his death. In 1952, however, one hundred years after his death,
Louis Braille's contribution was recognized in France and by the rest of
the world. His body was reinterred in Paris in the Pantheon, the
resting place of illustrious French men and women such as Voltaire, Zola
and Marie Curie. However, Louis' hands were severed from his body and
remain in an urn in the village cemetery of Coupvray, and Coupvray named
the street where he lived after their famous son.
Helen Keller in Paris
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Like all avid readers, Helen Keller recognized the
greatness of Louis Braille's contribution to her and other blind people
through her writings and speeches. In 1952 Helen was invited to join the
centennial celebrations of Louis' birth in Paris. She was given a
Medal of Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor and delivered a speech
in French honoring the life and legacy of Louis Braille. The speech is
translated here:
Sorbonne, Paris, June 21st, 1952.
Mister President, Professors, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am touched by the honor you have given me. I cannot help thinking
that this honor is not due to any accomplishment of mine, but is rather
for the encouragement of the blind and the deaf whom I represent.
On behalf of the blind people of the world, I thank you from the
bottom of my heart for having generously recognized the pride and
efforts of all those who refuse to succumb to their limitations. In our
way, we, the blind, are as indebted to Louis Braille as mankind is to
Gutenberg. It is true that the dot system is very different from
ordinary print, but these raised letters are, under our fingers,
precious seeds from which has grown our intellectual harvest. Without
the braille dot system, how incomplete and chaotic our education would
be! The dismal doors of frustration would shut us out from the untold
treasures of literature, philosophy and science. But, like a magic
wand, the six dots of Louis Braille have resulted in schools where
embossed books, like vessels, can transport us to ports of education,
libraries and all the means of expression that assure our independence.
Look at the strong solidarity that is already taking hold among blind
people all over the world, and how, thanks to international braille,
they have begun to weave words of kinship among themselves and with
humanity. This is truly a symbol of all the years in which blind people
have broken through the darkness with the inner light of human
knowledge. Blind people of the world simply ask that where their
abilities have been successfully put to the test, they are given the
chance to participate fully in the activities of their sighted
counterparts.
Can I tell you, esteemed faculty of the Sorbonne, my heartfelt
thoughts? You have shown a generous interest in the well being of
mankind. Above all, you represent France which is always in the
forefront of enlightened activity — the country where Louis Braille was
born and for whose legacy he worked. How better can we honor his memory
than by pursuing the Christian ideal of helping those with disabilities
and fostering a public spirit of cooperation that will enable the
visually impaired to reach enormous heights of accomplishment and
spiritual fulfillment?
Helen Keller
Source from AFB:America Foundation for the blind |
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INTRODUCTION
Born in Coupvary
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