About Louis Braille

Louis Braille was born Jan. 4, 1809 in a village 25 miles east of Paris.

His father was Simon-René Braille (born 1765), who was a well known harness and saddle maker, and his mother was Monique Baron (born 1770). They married 1792. His father also worked farm land and then a vineyard.

There were three older siblings: Monique Catherine Josephine (born 1793), Louis Simon (born 1795) and Marie Celine (born 1797).

Louis’ nickname was “Benjamin”.

Louis was blind in an accident at age 3 in 1812. The injured eye became infected and blinded both eyes a couple years later. Age 10, Louis attended the Royal Institute for the Blind Youth in Paris along the Seine River. There he learned by listening but not reading. Only method was to have raised letters, but it was a very slow method to read.

Louis met a soldier, Capt. Charles Barbier, in 1821, who told Louis about using 12 raised dots and dashes for alphabet letters to relay secret Army messages in the battlefield. Louis liked the idea and selected a cell of 6 dots, working on perfecting it between the age of 12 to 15. He was now able to publish his first braille book in 1829 in which he explained about using the new braille system. The book title: “Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them.”

Eight years later Louis added symbols for numbers and music. So the ability was given of not only reading but also writing using these raised dots. Most teachers of the blind were skeptic of this new form of reading. Louis later became a teacher at the Royal Institute and secretly used his new system with his students. In 1839, Louis published details of a method he had developed for communication with sighted people.

By 1840 with the assistance of Pierre Foucault, who was also blind, Braille developed a machine to speed up the printing process.

Louis' other interests included playing the piano, cello and organ. He played the organ in Churches for pay. He continued teaching at the Institute until his health started to fail. Louis died of tuberculosis in Jan. 6, 1852 in Paris.

The Braille System (touch reading & writing) was not adopted at the Royal Institute for the Blind Youth until after his death in 1852. It started to become popular in 1868 when some English instructors at the Royal Institute pushed for its use world-wide.

All types of items using braille now-a-days, including signs, clocks, watches and elevators. It has been adopted in every known language in the world.

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