Disability Throughout History: Louis Braille

There are some adaptive systems that are so well-known to the modern world that we cannot imagine a time without them. Braille, the raised-dot system of writing used primarily by those with visual impairments, could be classified as such. It is so ubiquitous that we forget the man it is named for, the creative and intelligent man who shared his gifts to improve his world. Though it took almost a century for it to be globally adopted, Braille has opened paths of knowledge and communication to untold numbers.

Portrait of Louis as an adult

Louis Braille was born to Simon-René, a leatherer, and his wife, Monique, on January 4, 1809. He was the youngest after three (much older) siblings: Monique Catherine, Louis-Simon, and Marie Céline. The family lived in Coupvray, a small town east of Paris. Thanks to Simon-René's success in business, they lived on three hectares of land with a vineyard.

Louis's birthplace in Coupvray

Like his siblings, Louis enjoyed playing in his father's workshop. When he was three years old, he was trying to make holes in a piece of leather with an awl. He pressed down hard on the piece, squinting closely, when the awl glanced off the leather and stabbed him in one eye. A local doctor bound and patched the eye and arranged for Louis to go to a surgeon in Paris the next day. No treatment could save his eye. It became severely infected and Louis suffered greatly for weeks. He eventually lost sight in his other eye, probably due to sympathetic ophthalmia. This is a very rare condition, possibly caused by an autoimmune inflammatory response that affects the undamaged eye following a traumatic injury. By the age of five, Louis was completely blind. He did not understand what was happening, often asking why it was always dark.

Louis's father's workshop, as illustrated by Robert Squier

Like many other stories we've learned about, Louis's parents were progressive for their time. They were determined to raise him like a typical child as much as possible. Simon-René made a cane for him and he learned to navigate their village. He was educated by Coupvray teachers and priests until the age of ten. He was reported to be very bright and creative. Louis was seemingly at peace with his vision loss.

In the late 1700s, there was still a debate of whether educating the blind was futile. In 1784, Valentin Haüy, a calligraphy professor, opened a school for the blind in Paris: Institut des Jeunes Aveugles (Institute for Blind Youth). This was the first special school for blind students in the world. The institute survived the French Revolution and later, in 1816, the school moved into a former prison. Sébastien Guillié then became its director until 1821; he was forced to leave due to brutality against the students. The meals were poor and students bathed in the one bathroom once a month; the building was cold, poorly lit, and unsanitary.

Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles

Beginning in February 1819, at the age of ten, Louis began attending the Institute. Though the school was underfunded and imperfect, it was a relatively stable environment for blind students to learn together. They learned to read using the Haüy method, a technique that involved tracing raised letters on heavy paper. This method was slow but did allow the students to learn to read using their sense of touch, a revolutionary concept at the time. The raised letters were made by pressing wet heavy paper against copper wire; this meant that students could not "write" in this way. Louis was frustrated that he could not send letters home and that the large and heavy books he read contained minimal information. His father, Simon-René, provided him with an alphabet made by bits of thick leather. Though slow and clumsy, Louis could trace the letters' outlines to write his first sentences. He loved to read and devoured the few Haüy books available to the students.

Book written using the Haüy method

As a young preteen, in 1821, Louis learned of another communication system developed by Charles Barbier: he used a code of up to twelve dots in two columns, pressed into thick papers. It was developed as a system for "night writing" used by the military. It could be easily read and written, since one only needed a simple board and pocket-sized stamp. It was limited, however, since it only transcribed phonetics. This system of raised dots inspired Louis to create a similar system, working nights and holidays when his schoolwork was finished. By 1824, when he was fifteen, he had largely finished his system. He had simplified Barbier's system, reducing the twelve raised dots to six and making uniform columns for each letter. It was finally possible to recognize letters with a single touch of a finger. He also included symbols for punctuation and numbers.

The first version used a system of dots and dashes. He published this in 1829, publishing a second edition in 1837 that discarded the dashes as they were too difficult to read. Louis also used Barbier's slate and stylus tools, one of several sets donated to the school, so that he could also write using this system. Because of his love for music, he even created a system of musical notation using the dots.

Procedure for Writing Words, Music, and Plainsong in Dots, by Louis Braille, 1829

Louis, as you can probably guess, was an exceptional student and, after learning all he could from the Institute, he was asked to stay as a teacher's aide. By 1833, at the age of 24, he was promoted to a full professor. He remained teaching there for most of the rest of life, teaching history, geometry, and algebra. He also had a knack for music, becoming an accomplished cellist and organist taught by Jean-Nicolas Marrigues. Louis played organ at churches all over France. He was a devout Catholic and held the position of organist at the Church of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs in Paris from 1834-1839; he later was the organist at the Church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul.

He published many written works about braille and education for the blind: Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs... (1829, revised 1837), Little Synopsis of Arithmetic for Beginners (1838), and New Method of Representing by Dots the Form of Letters, Maps, Geometric Figures, Musical Symbols, etc. for Use by the Blind (1839). He displayed his system at the Exhibition of Industry in Paris in 1834. Louis also assisted his friend Pierre-François-Victor Foucault, who invented the first printing machine for braille in 1843. Though Louis' work was groundbreaking, his system was not taught at the Institute during his lifetime. The director was allegedly worried that the students would become too independent and no longer need their sighted teachers. It was actively fought against by the school and not adopted until 1854, two years after Louis's death.

Though Louis was mentally very strong, he was chronically sickly. He had a persistent respiratory illness, probably tuberculosis. By the age of 40, he was forced to resign teaching. When it became clear that he would not live, he was admitted to the infirmary at the Royal Institution. He died there on January 6, 1852, two days after his 43rd birthday. He was buried at the Panthéon in Paris, though, as a symbolic gesture, his hands were buried in his home town of Coupvray. His childhood home now houses the Louis Braille Museum and a large monument erected in the town square in 1887, which was also renamed to Braille Square.

Louis's grave in the Panthéon in Paris

Monument in Braille Square, Coupvray

After the Institute adopted the braille system, IT spread through the French-speaking world. It was slower to expand in other places. In the first all-European conference of teachers of the blind in 1873, Dr. Thomas Rhodes Armitage championed the system and it quickly spread internationally. By 1882, he reported that every institution outside of North America used braille (in 1860, the Missouri School for the Blind became the first, and only for many years, US school to use braille). Braille was officially adopted by schools for the blind in the United States in 1916 and a universal braille code for English was completed in 1932. As technology developed, so did it for braille: there are braille computer terminals, RoboBraille document conversion service, and Nemeth Braille for mathematical and scientific notation.

Louis's braille system has endured and transformed the lives of millions of blind and visually impaired people for the last two centuries. His childhood home in Coupvray is a listed historic building and houses the Louise Braille Museum. The town square is named Braille Square and holds a large monument to him. His remains are housed in the Panthéon in Paris; his hands were buried in a symbolic gesture near his home. There are other statues and memorials to him around the globe. He has had numerous postage stamps and commemorative coins in his honor. The asteroid 9969 Braille was named for him 1992. Every year on January 4, Louis's birthday, World Braille Day is celebrated.

He has also been remembered, of course, by the arts. He has been the subjects of numerous children's books. There have been TV specials, TV movies, plays, songs, and musicals. In 1952, T.S. Eliot wrote: "Perhaps the most enduring honor to the memory of Louis Braille is the half-conscious honor we pay him by applying his name to the script he invented – and, in this country [England], adapting the pronunciation of his name to our own language. We honor Braille when we speak of braille. His memory has in this way a security greater than that of the memories of many men more famous in their day."

Most Sincerely,

Clem

Disability Throughout History

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