Louis Braille, The Making of Blind Alphabet

Today, blind people can read quickly and easily from books printed in Braille. They can take up full time jobs using special machinery such as Braille typewriters. However, before Louis Braille inverted his alphabet of raised dots, blind people were treated as outcasts. His invention opened up a new world for them.

Braille’s Life and Education

Louis Braille was born in 1809 at the village of Coupvray in France. He was blinded when he was three years old. His father was a saddler and the little crept into the workshop and tried to cut some leather by himself the sharp knife slipped and stabbed him in the left eye. Both his eyes became infected and within a few months he was blind.

When he was ten, Louis was sent to the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. There children read from books with large raised latter which were heavy and difficult to use. Louis decided to invent a special alphabet with the symbol which would be easier to read.

The Making of Blind Alphabet

In 1824, an army officer, Captain Charles Barbier, visited the institute to demonstrate night writing. This was a system raised dots which he had inverted for passing messages on a dark battlefield. Braille adopted this idea for his alphabet. He used six dots and worked out different patterns for all the letters and punctuation marks.

In 1826, Braille became a teacher at the Institute where he remained for the rest of his life. His alphabet was first used at the Institute in 1829, but it was not known to the rest of the world until 1868, when a blind Englishman, Dr Armitage, discovered it and began publishing books in Braille. In 1932 it was adopted as the main alphabet for the blind and is now widely used all over the world.

Death of Alexander Graham Bell

Louis Braille died on January 6, 1852, in Paris, France, at the age of 43 at the Institute, Paris. The cause of his death was complications from tuberculosis.