Louis Braille

Louis Braille

Hello everybody. Today’s a nice day and I’m very glad to be here to tell all of you about the great life of Louis Braille, who designed the coding system, based on patterns of raised dots, by which the blind can read through touch.
Louis was from a small town called Coupvray, near Paris—he was born on January 4 in 1809. Louis became blind by accident, when he was 3 years old. Deep in his Dad's harness workshop, Louis tried to be like his Dad, but it went very wrong; he grabbed an awl, a sharp tool for making holes, and the tool slid and hurt his eye. The wound got infected, and the infection spread, and soon, Louis was blind in both eyes.
All of a sudden, Louis needed a new way to learn. He stayed at his old school for two more years, but he couldn't learn everything just by listening. Things were looking up when Louis got a scholarship to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris, when he was 10. But even there, most of the teachers just talked at the students. The library had 14 huge books with raised letters that were very hard to read. Louis was impatient.
Then in 1821, a former soldier named Charles Barbier visited the school. Barbier shared his invention called "night writing," a code of 12 raised dots that let soldiers share top-secret information on the battlefield without even having to speak. Unfortunately, the code was too hard for the soldiers, but not for 12-year-old Louis!
Louis trimmed Barbier's 12 dots into 6, ironed out the system by the time he was 15. Here is the Braille alphabet, it consisted of various arrangements of raised dots within a six dot pattern. When forming a word, letters will be combined with short dashes.
Then Louis published the first-ever braille book in 1829. But he didn’t stop there. In 1837, he added symbols for math and music. But since the public was skeptical, blind students had to study braille on their own. Even at the Royal Institution, where Louis taught after he graduated, braille...

Similar Essays