Louis Braille

by Morgan

Louis Braille lived in Coupvray, France. When he was 3 he was playing with an awl, a sharp pointed tool. The awl slipped and hit him in the eye. Later it got infected. After that, the infection spread into his other eye. When he was 10 he went to the Royal Institute of Blind Youth in Paris. At the institute, he learned arithmetic, grammar, geography, history and music. Louis liked to read but the only books they had were in raised print which was really hard to read. In 1821, when Louis was 12 years old, Captain Charles Barbier came to the Institute. Captain Barbier had created a way for his soldiers to write notes to each other in the dark. This was called night writing and used patterns of dots that stood for sounds. This is how Louis first got the idea to use dots to help the blind to read. Louis worked with night writing for 3 years but it was too difficult because there are so many sounds in the French language. Then he came up with the idea to have patterns of dots stand for letters instead of sounds. This would be much easier because there are only 26 letters. Louis had invented the Braille alphabet. He was just 15 years old.

It took many years for the Braille alphabet to be accepted. It first began to be recognized in 1844 when it was demonstrated at the grand opening of the Institute’s new building. Louis was 35 years old when this happened but he was very sick. He had tuberculosis, a bad lung disease. Louis Braille died on January 6, 1852. Not one newspaper in Paris printed the story of his death.