Katana VentraIP

Louis Braille

Louis Braille (/breɪl/; French: [lwi bʁɑj]; 4 January 1809 – 6 January 1852) was a French educator and the inventor of a reading and writing system named after him, braille, intended for use by visually impaired people. His system is used worldwide and remains virtually unchanged to this day.

Louis Braille

(1809-01-04)4 January 1809

Coupvray, France

6 January 1852(1852-01-06) (aged 43)

Paris, France
  • Educator
  • inventor

Braille

Braille was blinded at the age of three in one eye as a result of an accident with a stitching awl in his father's harness making shop. Consequently, an infection set in and spread to both eyes, resulting in total blindness.[1] At that time, there were not many resources in place for the blind, but he nevertheless excelled in his education and received a scholarship to France's Royal Institute for Blind Youth. While still a student there, he began developing a system of tactile code that could allow blind people to read and write quickly and efficiently. Inspired by a system invented by Charles Barbier, Braille's new method was more compact and lent itself to a range of uses, including music. He presented his work to his peers for the first time in 1824, when he was fifteen years old.


In adulthood, Braille served as a professor at the Institute and had an avocation as a musician, but he largely spent the remainder of his life refining and extending his system. It went unused by most educators for many years after his death, but posterity has recognized braille as a revolutionary invention, and it has been adapted for use in languages worldwide.

Later life[edit]

Although Braille was admired and respected by his pupils, his writing system was not taught at the institute during his lifetime. The successors of Valentin Haüy, who had died in 1822, showed no interest in altering the established methods of the school,[26] and indeed, they were actively hostile to its use. Dr. Alexandre René Pignier, headmaster at the school, was dismissed from his post after he had a history book translated into braille.[34]


Braille had always been a sickly child, and his condition worsened in adulthood. A persistent respiratory illness, long believed to be tuberculosis, dogged him. Despite the lack of a cure at the time, Braille lived with the illness for 16 years. By the age of 40, he was forced to relinquish his position as a teacher. When his condition reached mortal danger, he was admitted to the infirmary at the Royal Institution, where he died in 1852, two days after he turned 43.[6][35]

It remains uncertain which eye was actually struck first. Most accounts of Braille's accident omit reference to left or right. Braille's American biographer J. Alvin Kugelmass wrote that it was the left eye, but C. Michael Mellor and Lennard Bickel state definitively that it was the right.

^ a:

Bickel, Lennard (1989). Triumph Over Darkness: The Life of Louis Braille. Leicester: Ulverscroft.  978-0708920046. (also large print)

ISBN

Farrell, Gabriel (1956). The Story of Blindness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.  263655.

OCLC

Kugelmass, J. Alvin (1951). Louis Braille: Windows for the Blind. New York: Inc. OCLC 8989771.

Julian Messner

Lorimer, Pamela (1996). . University of Birmingham. OCLC 49619181. Archived from the original on 30 March 2012.

A critical evaluation of the historical development of the tactile modes of reading and analysis and evaluation of researches carried out in endeavours to make the braille code easier to read and to write (Ph. D. thesis)

Olstrom, Clifford E. (10 July 2012). . Watertown, MA: Perkins School for the Blind. ISBN 978-0-9822721-9-0. Retrieved 4 December 2011.

Undaunted By Blindness

Reynolds, Cecil R.; Fletcher-Janzen, Elaine (2007). . John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-67798-7.

Encyclopedia of Special Education: A-D

Mellor, C. Michael (2006). . Boston: National Braille Press. ISBN 978-0-939173-70-9.

Louis Braille: A Touch of Genius

Weygand, Zina (2009). . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-5768-3.

The Blind in French Society: From the Middle Ages to the century of Louis Braille

by Pierre Henri. Paris: Pr. universit. de France (1952). (in French)

La vie et l'oeuvre de Louis Braille: Inventeur de l'alphabet des aveugles (1809–1852)

Louis Braille Online Museum – American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Original pages from , 1829 edition, at the National Federation of the Blind

Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plainsong...

Text of (2999) at Archive.org

New Method of Representing by Dots...

(in French)

Valentin Haüy Association