Louis Braille was born in 1809 at the village of Coupvray, twenty-five miles east of Paris, to a saddler and his wife, who named all their children after kings and queens of France. Blinded at the age of three in an accident when he was playing with the tools in his father’s workshop, he would never have any memory of being sighted. As a boy he was taught to read by feeling upholstery studs hammered into pieces of wood in the shapes of letters and numbers. In 1819, when he was ten, he was accepted at the Institute for Blind Children in Paris.
Charles Barbier, a captain in Napoleon's army, visited the institute to demonstrate his 'night writing'. This was a tactile system designed for soldiers to send and receive messages at night without speaking. It used raised dots and dashes rather than actual letters.
Louis quickly realised how useful this system could be, but thought it was too complicated. Over the next few years he worked hard to develop his own version of the code. By 1824, aged just 15 years old, Louis had found 63 ways to use a six-dot cell in an area no larger than a fingertip.
In adulthood, Braille served as a professor at the Institute and had an avocation as a musician, but he largely spent the remainder of his life refining and extending his system.
Louis Braille died in 1852, two days after his 43rd birthday. It took two years after his death for his code, by now referred to as braille, to be adopted as the official communications system for blind people in France.
On June 20th, 1952, Louis Braille’s remains were disinterred at Coupvray and taken to Paris to be deposited with honour in the Panthéon. The bones of Braille’s hands, however, were separated and kept in a concrete box on top of his empty tomb at Coupvray.
Wow! The story of his life is certainly interesting! Thank you for including the information in your narrative. Great idea for the 'writing' B&W challenge. :-)
@dmdfday Thank you Diana, your work with the students must have been very rewarding. I tried with the focus to mimic what some visually impaired may see
February 24th, 2018
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