by Peter Claridge Bowler

On January 4th 1809  Louis Braille was born. Who could imagine this one person could and would change the lives of millions of blind and visually impaired people across the globe, influencing so many prominent figures centuries after his death?

At the age of 3 years, he suffered an accident in his father’s leather shop causing him to lose sight in his right eye, subsequently eventually losing sight in his left eye due to infection and inflammation. At the age of 5 Louis Braille was totally blind, by the age of 10 in 1819: he was accepted to Frances’s most prominent School for the blind in the country. This school was highly rated for the way it taught blind children how to read, before the invention of Braille, the way that blind and visually impaired children were taught to read was via a raised form of print writing.

This would be achieved by embossing large print letters for the children to trace their fingers over the letters to read, the library at said school was extremely limited with the amount of available books, at this time in particular there were only three books when Louis Braille first attended the school.

The embossed writing was large and impractical to read at any kind of speed, the size of the books also meant that they were very costly to produce, so having access to them was very limited.

In the 1820s a French sergeant Charles Barbier created and developed a form of night writing, that could be read by touch, to aid in communication at night during combat, this system was comprised of 26 dots per sound, as this system was not created with spelling in mind, it was created to simulate the sounding of words, so there would be no spelling or grammar.

In 1821 Braille was introduced to Barbier’s night writing system and then for the next 3 years, Braille worked on developing and refining Barbier’s system into the 6 dot that we know as Braille today.

Braille first presented his development in 1824 to the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles, Braille faced great resistance towards his invention, so much so that it was never implemented at the school he both studied at and taught at a few years later: during this time Braille never stopped working and developing his system, he not only created a form of reading and writing for people who are blind and visually impaired but also created the Braille music system as well, so that musicians would be able to read the music in Braille.

Despite creating a remarkable system embraced worldwide by numerous blind and visually impaired individuals, Louis Braille never witnessed the fruition of his invention. Passing away in 1852 at the age of 42, it took several years posthumously for his system to be adopted. Now, nearly two centuries later, we commemorate the enduring legacy of the system he pioneered, granting countless blind and visually impaired individuals the capacity to read and write.