Who is Louis Braille?
Find out more about Louis Braille.
Braille was named after its inventor, Louis Braille, who was born in a small town near Paris on 4 January 1809. His father was a cobbler. Louis lost his sight when he was 3 years old by injuring his eye with one of his father’s tools. This caused an infection, which spread to his other eye and he lost all of his sight.
Louis went to the village school for two years, where he learned by listening. At the age of 10 he got a scholarship to go to a school for blind boys in Paris, one of the first in the world. At the school, he was taught practical skills like chair caning and slipper making. Here, he became very good at maths and science and learned to play the organ. He was also taught to read but not to write. The letters he read were raised on a page. These letters were made by pressing letters made with copper wire onto a page. This type of writing was very hard to read because it was not easy to tell one letter from another.
In 1821, a soldier named Charles Barbier de la Serre visited Louis' school to show the school children his invention, "night writing". Night writing was used by soldiers so that they could pass messages along trenches at night. It was too hard so the army didn’t use it. Louis wanted to invent an easier way of reading. He experimented with different codes and finally invented Braille. Braille uses a combination of six raised dots that represents each letter in the alphabet. He also developed a different code for maths and music. In 1827 the first Braille book was produced. Not only could people who are blind or vision impaired use Braille to read but they could also now write using a simple stylus to make the dots.
Louis eventually became a teacher at the school. Unfortunately, he did not live to see Braille used widely. Louis died on 6 January 1852, at the age of 43, from tuberculosis – a disease of his lungs. Braille was not recognised as a way of reading and writing until 1918. Louis Braille is buried in the Pantheon, the home of France's national heroes.
Today, Braille is used throughout the world and is taught to children from an early age.