Biography of Louis Braille

Louis Braille (1809-1852) designed the coding system, based on patterns of raised dots, by which the blind can read through touch.

Braille designed a coding system, based on patterns of raised dots, which the blind could read by touch. Born in Coupvray, France, Braille was accidentally blinded in one eye at the age of three. Within two years, a disease in his other eye left him completely blind.

In 1819, Braille received a scholarship to the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles (National Institute of Blind Youth), founded by Valentin Haüy (1745-1822). The same year Braille entered the school, Captain Charles Barbier invented sonography, or nightwriting, a system of embossed symbols used by soldiers to communicate silently at night on the battlefield. Inspired by a lecture Barbier gave at the Institute a few years later, the fifteen-year-old Braille adapted Barbier's system to replace Haüy's awkward embossed type, which he and his classmates had been obliged to learn.

In his initial study, Braille had experimented with geometric shapes cut from leather as well as with nails and tacks hammered into boards. He finally settled on a fingertip-sized six-dot code, based on the twenty-five letters of the alphabet, which could be recognized with a single contact of one digit. By varying the number and placement of dots, he coded letters, punctuation, numbers, diphthongs, familiar words, scientific symbols, mathematical and musical notation, and capitalization. With the right hand, the reader touched individual dots and, with the left, moved on toward the next line, comprehending as smoothly and rapidly as sighted readers. Using the Braille system, students were also able to take notes and write themes by punching dots into paper with a pointed stylus which was aligned with a metal guide.

At the age of twenty, Braille published a monograph describing the use of his coded system. In 1837, he issued a second publication featuring an expanded system of coding text. Despite the students' favorable response to the Braille code, sighted instructors and school board members, fearing for their jobs should the number of well-educated blind individuals increase, opposed his system.

Braille grew seriously ill with incurable tuberculosis in 1835 and was forced to resign his teaching post. The Braille writing system--though demonstrated at the Paris Exposition of Industry in 1834 and praised by King Louis-Philippe--was not fully accepted until 1854, two years after the inventor's death. The system underwent periodic alteration; the standardized system employed today was first used in the United States in 1860 at the Missouri School for the Blind.

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of Louis Braille (1809-1852)
• At the time of Braille's birth:
• Thomas Jefferson was president of the United States
• Elizabeth Ann Seton founded first American parochial school
• Moses Rogers made first ocean voyage by steamboat
• Malvern Hill completed by English painter John Constable
• Napoleon told wife Josephine that he was divorcing her for political reasons
• At the time of Braille's death:
• Millard Fillmore was president of the United States
• Louis Napoleon proclaimed second French Empire
• Uncle Tom's Cabin published by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Aristide Boucicaut joined a small piece-goods store in Paris; he will turn Bon Marché into the world's first department store
• Massachusetts adopted compulsory school-attendance law
• The times:
• 1792-1848: The First Republic of France
• 1812-1814: War of 1812
• Braille's contemporaries:
• Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) French artist
• Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) French novelist
• Dorothea Dix (1802-1887) American educator
• Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) Danish writer
• Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) German composer
• P.T. Barnum (1810-1891) American circus owner
• Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) American writer
• Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) Italian composer
• Elias Howe (1819-1867) American inventor
• Selected world events:
• 1815: Napoleon defeated at Battle of Waterloo
• 1822: Egyptologist Jean François Champollion deciphered the Rosetta stone
• 1827: Frederick William Herschel invented contact lenses
• 1828: Noah Webster completed American Dictionary of English Language
• 1836: Arc de Triomphe completed in Paris
• 1839: Kirkpatrick MacMillan invented bicycle
• 1846: William Morton pioneered modern anesthesiology
• 1848: American Association for the Advancement of Science founded

Further Reading

• Bickel, Lennard, Triumph Over Darkness: The Life of Louis Braille, Allen & Unwin Australia, 1988.
• Bryant, Jennifer, Louis Braille: Inventor, Chelsea House, 1993.
• Roblin, Jean, Louis Braille, Royal National Institute for the Blind.