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| Sunday, 19 March 2006 |
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Junior Observer |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Louis Braille - Introduced reading to the blind Just imagine, a boy of your age, sitting down on his bed, the moon shining down on his pale, little face... He is up late into the night and working with his thick paper and stylus (needle-like instrument used as a pen). This little boy was named Louis Braille and he was on the verge of creating the brand new alphabet that all blind people around the world would use at one point or another.
In 1812, Louis Braille went blind at the age of three, when he was trying to cut leather with an awl (a pricking tool) in his father's saddle shop, a couple of miles out of Paris, France. But, the awl slipped and went into his eye. Soon, the doctor told him and his family that Louis had an infection in his eye. A few days later, Louis started to complain that his other eye was stinging. The doctor who checked on him reported that he would soon become blind. Seven years later, on February 15, 1819, his family sent him off to the National Institute for Blind Children, where he surpassed his classmates and began to play the piano and the organ. At the age of 15, Louis completed his first dot alphabet, by getting up in the middle of the night and working on his invention, but then, falling asleep during class! Louis wanted to work by himself, and not with other people. Some of the reasons that enabled him to invent the Braille alphabet were that he was blind, he was determined, and he didn't want to read the big books that the school gave its students. Louis's version of Braille was based on Captain Charles Barbier's invention of sonography - a grooved slate to hold the paper, and a sliding ruler to guide the stylus. The ruler was pierced by little windows. By positioning the stylus in these openings, a blind person could punch dots across the page with precision (correctness), then slide the ruler down to the next line. The stylus produces depressions (holes) on the paper. One must therefore write from right to left, and turn over the paper in order to read it. With this system, Louis swept away all the shortcomings of embossing. The raised-dot characters were simple and complete. They could be read quickly with the touch of a finger. They took up less space than conventional printed letters. The Braille system, as it came to be known, made it possible to place all the world's literature at the fingertips of blind people. Louis first published the new Braille alphabet in 1829 and revised it in 1837, including all the letters of the French alphabet (W was added later), punctuation, mathematical symbols, and even musical notation. After Louis graduated from the institute, he decided to become a teacher there. He was readily accepted since he designed the system they used at the institute. Later, Louis started to suffer from tuberculosis and both he and Braille were forgotten at the institute. Louis and the Braille system were reintroduced in 1854, two years after his death. Louis Braille was buried in The Pantheon in Paris, France. Some lessons we could learn from his lifestory is that if you're
determined to do something, you can do it!
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