Louis Braille began losing his sight at three years old, due to an accident with a toy that struck him in the eye and which became infected and spread to his other eye. By age five, Louis was completely blind. It was 1812 and there was nothing that medicine could do for either eye.
He was lucky though and was able to attend one of the first blind schools in the world, the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris. There, Louis was exposed to the “night writing” method invented by Captain Charles Barbier of the French Army. It was a series of dashes and dots intended to be read by soldiers when putting on a light might be dangerous. But the night writing system was rather complicated and difficult to use. It did, however, inspire Louis to try and make a better system on his own. By the time Louis was 15 years old, he had trimmed Barbier’s 12 dots into six and had found 63 ways to use a six-dot cell in an area no larger than a fingertip. Braille, the system still used around the world, had been born.
Just to finish off Louis’ story – his life did not end at age 15! He published his own system in 1829 and added symbols for both mathematics and music. He went on to have a number of publications about the new reading and writing system, and in 1833, Louis was offered a full professorship where he taught history, geometry and algebra. He also became an accomplished cellist and organist. Unfortunately his invention was met with skepticism by the public. It was not even taught at Braille’s alma mater, the Royal Institute. Due to a persistent respiratory illness he was forced to give up teaching and move back to his hometown at age 40.
In 1852, Louis Braille died, just two days after his 43rd birthday. He would never know how widespread his invention would become. Today there are over 250 million people with visual impairments, who are able to access the written word thanks to Louis Braille.
