Louis Braille’s language system enables blind people to read; they memorize
the meaning of patterns of raised dots and interpret them with their fi ngers.
Getty/Raymond Kleboe
7 Louis Braille 7Braille was himself blinded at the age of three in an
accident that occurred while he was playing with tools in
his father’s harness shop. A tool slipped and plunged into his
right eye. Sympathetic ophthalmia and total blindness
followed. Nevertheless, he became a notable musician
and excelled as an organist. Upon receiving a scholarship,
he went to Paris in 1819 to attend the National Institute
for Blind Children, and from 1826 he taught there.
Braille became interested in a system of writing, exhib-
ited at the school by Charles Barbier, in which a message
coded in dots symbolizing phonetic sounds was embossed
on cardboard. It was called night writing and was intended
for nighttime battlefi eld communications. In 1824, when
he was only 15 years old, Braille worked out an adaptation,