January 6 1852 – Louis Braille, Inventor Of The Touch-based Alphabet For the Blind, Died

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Louis Braille, French teacher and educationist, best known for the invention of Braille, the system of reading and writing that facilitates learning by blind individuals, died on January 6, 1852. He was 43 years old and had dedicated a lifetime to developing, perfecting, and teaching the Braille system. Braille is now an international standard and has been adopted in over 43 languages of the world. Louis Braille was born on January 4, 1809, at Coupvray, near Paris, in the east of France. Simon-Rene, his father was a successful leather craftsman. At the age of three, Louis pricked his eye with a tool from his father’s workshop in the course of play. Despite the best efforts of Parisian surgeons, young Louis went partially blind. By the age of five, the infection from the injured eye spread to the other and Louis was completely blinded. His parents made exemplary efforts to raise the blind son in a normal fashion and encouraged him to pursue education. Louis went on to attend one of the earliest schools for blind children in the world, the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. The students at the institute were taught vocational skills apart from being taught the “raised type” – letters formed by embossing letters on a heavy paper surface – a system devised by Valentin Haüy. Apart from making for very slow reading, the system did not allow blind students to write. There were only 14 books in the institute which were published using the raised type. Louis quickly read them all up but was determined to find a new system that would allow him to read and write. Braille proved to be an exemplary student at the institute and soon exhausted the school’s curriculum. He was asked to stay on at the institute as a teacher’s assistant. His passion for teaching and learning secured for him a full professorship by 1833. Braille remained a successful teacher at the institute for many years. At the Institute that Louis learned of a coded system of raised letters introduced by the French army captain, Charles Barbier de la Serre in 1821. His system called “Night Writing” used a series of 12 raised dots to represent sounds. It was intended for soldiers to communicate without speaking or striking a light. The French army rejected it due to its complexity. Louise Braille adopted and modified the system to form his own, with six dots representing the letters. He spent his lifetime teaching blind students and helping them learn to read and write. Ironically, the institute at which Braille taught was highly resistant to this new form of learning. Despite having gained a reputation as a much-admired and respected teacher, Louis Braille was not allowed to teach his code at the institute. Through his lifetime, Louis Braille went largely unrecognized for his contribution. Louis Braille died on January 6, 1852, two days after he turned 43. The cause of his death was a persistent respiratory ailment brought on by a lifetime’s struggle in the cold, difficult environment of the institute. It is now believed that Louis may have died of tuberculosis. He died in his family home in Coupvray. In 1873, Braille was promoted by Dr. Thomas Rhodes Armitage at the first conference for teachers of the blind in Europe. Many of the European nations moved to adopt Braille thereafter. In 1916, Braille came to be officially recognized and adopted by schools and educational institutions for the blind in the United States. In 1919, the Braille Institute was founded. The institute now produces more than 5 million Braille pages each year. By 1932, a universal braille code for English was formally adopted. By the centenary of his death in 1952, the Braille code had started to gain global popularity. Louis Braille’s accomplishment came to light and the French government gave him his due recognition. Braille’s body was exhumed from the Coupvray grave and reburied amidst the French national heroes in the Pantheon at Paris. In 2009, the two-hundredth anniversary of Louis Braille’s birth was celebrated worldwide and many countries released commemorative currency and stamps. The French teacher also has an asteroid named after him – the Asteroid 9969 Braille. You may also like : January 6 1929 – Mother Teresa Arrives in India