Louis Braille: Biography and Story of the Blind Inventor of Braille

Profile and Biography of Louis Braille. Blind people may have to thank Louis Braille because Louis Braille is known as the inventor of Braille Braille. This coding system allows blind or visually impaired people to read and write independently. The braille code system is still used today by visually impaired people.

Louis Braille Biography

Louis Braille was born on January 4, 1809, in Coupvray, a small town near Paris, France. He lives in a modest house with his father, Simon Rene Braille, and his mother, Monique.

His father worked in his workshop as a shoe and leather equipment maker. Little Louis loved playing in his father’s workshop.

At the age of 4, while playing with his father’s work tools, he had an accident. Jara, a sharp tool for piercing skin, accidentally injured one of his eyes. The infection in the injured eye soon spread to the other eye, resulting in total blindness in both eyes. Stay up-to-date with Deltsapure! Provide accurate and updated news for readers.

Study hard even though you are blind

Even though he couldn’t see, little Louis managed to show a strong desire to learn. Louis’ parents and local school teachers saw great potential in him.

Therefore, when he entered school, he was allowed to follow lessons in class – along with his friends with normal vision – by relying on his sense of hearing.

He was able to follow the lessons well. The only obstacle is that he can only read and write lessons if he listens to what his teacher conveys orally.

In Louis Braille’s biography, it is known that at the age of 10, he received a scholarship to study at the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris, a special educational institution for blind children.

There, he learned to read letters printed and embossed on paper by feeling them. At this school, several books with an embossed printing system are also provided by the school’s founder, Valentin Hauy.

These books contain large letters embossed on each page. Because of the large size of the letters, the size of the book is quite large, so the price is very expensive.

The school only has 14 books like this. With great patience, Young Louis managed to “devour” all the books in his school library. Louis Braille could feel every letter embossed on the books, but reading and understanding each sentence was quite time-consuming.

It takes several seconds to identify a word, and when he gets to the end of a sentence, he often needs to remember what he read at the beginning. Louis believed there must be an easier way so that blind people could read as quickly and easily as sighted people.

History of Braille Letters or Codes

The history of Braille began in 1821. At that time, a French army captain named Charles Barbier visited Louis Braille’s school. Captain Barbier presented his discovery called night writing.

Night Writing is a code that allows troops to share secret information on the battlefield without speaking or turning on a flashlight to read it. This code consists of 12 raised dots that can be combined to represent letters and can be felt by the fingertips.

The Discovery of Braille

Unfortunately, this code was too complicated for most of his troops, so it was rejected for official use in his units, but not for the 12-year-old blind student Louis Braille. The young Louis Braille soon realized how useful this raised dot system would be if he succeeded in simplifying it. After Barbier’s visit, he seriously experimented with producing different raised dot systems.

In Louis Braille’s biography, it is known that within three years, at the age of 15, he finally succeeded in building an ideal system, which is now called Braille, using one 6-dot cell and based on normal spelling. Each braille character or cell consists of six dot positions. These point positions are arranged in two columns, each containing three point positions, thus forming a rectangle.

One or more dots may be generated at one or more of the six dot positions to represent a particular letter of the alphabet, punctuation mark, or number. Louis Braille then discovered 63 possible combinations of raised dots. Does it stop here? No. He even continued to develop this system in the following years and succeeded in adding symbols for mathematics and music.

Next

In 1829, Louis Braille published Method of Writing Words, Music and Plain Song using Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged by Them, the first Braille book ever published worldwide.

Blind people read Braille by moving their fingertips over the dots that appear. They can write braille letters on paper on a 6-key machine called a braille writer.

The method uses a stylus, a tool like a ballpoint pen without ink with a pointed tip. Eventually, Louis Braille became a teacher at the school where he had been a pupil, the Royal Institution for Blind Youth.

He became a teacher that his students liked and respected. Unfortunately, he did not have the chance to see the reading and writing system he invented, which is widely used worldwide.

Louis Braille Dies

On January 6, 1852, at the age of 43, Louis Braille, known as the inventor of the Braille letters or code, died of an attack of tuberculosis.

Quoted from the Britannica encyclopedia, in the biography of Louis Braille, it is known that a century after his death, Louis Braille’s body was moved from his homeland of Coupvray to Paris to be buried in the Panthéon.

Development of Braille Letters After the Death of Louis Braille

At first, people didn’t think braille coding was useful for blind people. Many people suspect that the braille system will die like its inventor. Thankfully, a few people realize the importance of Louis Braille’s discovery.

In 1868, Dr. Thomas Armitage led a group of blind people – consisting of four people – to establish an institution to develop and disseminate the system discovered by Louis Braille.

This small group continued to grow and develop into the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB), now known as Europe’s largest publisher of braille books. Louis Braille’s brilliant invention changed the world of reading and writing for blind people forever.

Today, the Braille code has been adapted into almost all known written languages worldwide. Louis has proven that with strong motivation, we can do things that previously needed clarification.

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