WHILE PLAYING IN HIS FATHER’S LEATHER SHOP, three-year-old Louis Braille tried to push an awl into a piece of leather, as he had seen his father effortlessly do many times. With his face much too close to the action, the awl slipped and, in a blinding second, the point of the tool penetrated deep into one of his eyes.
His parents rushed him to the local doctor. But in 1812, there was little hope and even less knowledge about antibiotics. The perforated eye was lost, and an uncontrollable infection ate away at the remaining eye shortly afterward.
Louis, intelligent and creative, was blind by his fifth birthday. However, he coped with his blindness well, first with help from his three older siblings and later with the use of walking canes made by his father. He attended school with sighted children until the age of ten, when he was invited to enroll in one of the world's first schools for blind children, the Royal Institute for Blind Youth.
Linguist Valentin Haüy had established the Institute in 1785 as a trade school in which blind students learned to weave and to make their own school uniforms. They made and sold items to the public, including fishing nets, chair cushions, and buggy whips. They even learned to play musical instruments and were in demand for public performances. But for Louis, the skill he treasured most was reading.
Reading was taught through a system devised by Haüy in which large books, some so heavy they couldn’t be lifted, could be read by tracing the shapes of the letters of the alphabet with the fingers. Each letter had to be felt and interpreted, the letters and words stored in the reader’s memory until the sentence was clear. Unfortunately, the first words of a sentence were often lost before the last words could be interpreted, making the system slow and inefficient.
At the time of Louis’s enrollment in 1819, the school library contained fourteen books. As slow as the reading was, Louis quickly read every book and asked, “Where are the other books that blind persons can read?”
From young Louis’s point of view, the more significant problem was that there was no way for a blind person to hand produce Haüy’s embossed characters. At 12, Louis wanted not only to read but to write as well, and he knew it had to be possible. The beginnings of that possibility were already under development by a military officer, Charles Barbier, at the French Royal Military Academy in Paris, following the annihilation of an army post when a French soldier had exposed his squad’s position by lighting a lamp to read a military dispatch.
Captain Barbier called his experimental writing Ecriture Nocturne (Night Writing), using a system loosely based on Samuel Morse’s Morse Code, in which up to eight dots and dashes were used to represent characters of the French alphabet. Barbier’s writing used an embossing tool to form the Morse Code’s dots and dashes on a moistened sheet of heavy paper.
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| Louis Braille |
In 1823, Louis Braille and other top students demonstrated Haüy’s system at a French Museum of Science and Industry event. Captain Barbier was there to demonstrate his Night Writing to the participants. When Barbier gave Louis a copy of his system, the boy knew he had found the foundation for a language of his own. Within a year he had reduced the dots-per-character from twelve to six and begun to write on heavy paper with a pointed, awl-like stylus—not unlike the one that had blinded him as a child. It would take 100 years before the world would adopt his system. But eventually, Braille became the preferred method for written communication for the blind.
Louis Braille never left the National Institute for Blind Youth. Instead, he became one of the school’s most dedicated teachers. One week before he died in 1852, he dictated his Last Will and Testament, giving his wealth to his family and his clothing and a few personal items to his students. The will included a peculiar request: that a certain wooden box in his room be “burned to ashes” without being opened. After his funeral, when it came time to burn the box curiosity got the best of his family. Opening it, they found hundreds of promissory notes in Braille from students who had borrowed money from their generous teacher over the years.
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| Wayne Winterton, PhD |
Wayne Winterton began his career in 1963 as a public school teacher, and later as the principal of two schools on the Navajo Reservation (Lake Valley, and Dzilth-na-o-dith-hle). He was also the Superintendent of the Albuquerque Indian High School, the Superintendent of Schools for the Northern Pueblos Agency (northern New Mexico), and during 1978-79, he served as the interim President of the Institute of American Indian Arts, a junior college in Santa Fe. In 1986, he joined the staff of the Bureau of Land Management’s National Training Center in Phoenix as the Division Chief for Administrative and Media Services, and later, as Center Director before his retirement in 2004 with 41 years of public service.
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