January 6th 1852: Louis Braille dies
On this day in 1852, the French educator Louis Braille died in Paris aged 43. Braille is best known for inventing the system of reading and writing used by blind people. He was born in a small French town in January 1809 and was blinded aged three, in an accident with an awl he found in his father’s workshop. The boy lost the sight in both eyes due to the accident, but refused to give up on his education. He struggled at school, as even at the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris - where he began attending when he was ten - the teachers just talked at the students. Braille found the school’s fourteen raised-letter books entirely inadequate and was desperate to find a better way to read. When Braille was twelve, a former soldier called Charles Barbier visited the school and demonstrated his ‘night writing’ code of raised dots and dashes for soldiers to communicate. The exceptionally gifted young Braille then modified Barbier’s system, using just six dots rather than twelve to make it quicker and easier to read. Poignantly, Braille created his own raised dot system using an awl, the same instrument that had blinded him. In 1829, when he was twenty, he published the first ever braille book. Braille continued to modify and improve the system, but unfortunately its brilliance was not recognised until after his death in 1852. It was in 1868, when the forerunners of the British Royal National Institute for the Blind took up the cause, that the system began to be taught and spread worldwide. Louis Braille’s invention is now used all around the world and has provided blind people everywhere with a tool to read books and public signs and to communicate independently.
“We do not need pity, nor do we need to be reminded we are vulnerable. We must be treated as equals – and communication is the way this can be brought about”
- Louis Braille
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