Louis Braille, a young French boy, was playing with a sharp awl in his father’s workshop when it slipped and wounded his eye. Infection spread to his other eye and at the age of 5 he was left completely blind. Needing a new way to educate himself he was sent to the National Institute for Blind Children in Paris, the first school of its kind in the world. There, he learned to read with his fingers, using books with embossed Latin letters. But the books were expensive to make, and the school could afford only a handful to share among many students.
When Louis was twelve, he was given an idea which would change his life and the lives of countless others. In the early 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte had tried to gain an advantage in battle by giving his soldiers a method of communicating silently at night. Charles Barbier, a French army captain, invented a reading system of raised dots which the military found too complicated. By 1821 Napoleon was in exile and at the end of his life, but the idea lived on and when Barbier shared it at the National Institute that year Louis was inspired to improve it.
At the age of 15 Louis presented the first version of the alphabet which is now named after him. Using an awl, the same instrument which had taken away his ability to read, he created a system of raised dots which would give it back. The Braille system spread rapidly in the French-speaking world, but was slow to catch on in English. It was only in the 1930s that an English system for Braille was formalised.
Today, the World Health Organisation tells us there are 285 million visually impaired people in the world, and 39 million of them are blind. The difference braille-literacy makes to peoples’ life chances is enormous. In the United States only 10% of visually impaired people who are braille-literate are unemployed compared with 67% for those who cannot read Braille. The many visually impaired people with satisfying careers owe a great deal to the little boy who refused to be left in the dark.
