Louis Braille

French inventor and social reformer

• Born: January 4, 1809
• Birthplace: Coupvray, France
• Died: January 6, 1852
• Place of death: Paris, France

Braille invented what became a worldwide system for teaching the blind to read and write and thereby made an enduring contribution to the education and lives of the visually impaired.

Early Life

Louis Braille’s mother, Constance Braille, was the daughter of a farming family in the countryside near Coupvray. His father, who also bore the name Louis, was a harness-maker. While playing in his father’s workshop, the three-year-old Louis suffered an accident that would lead first to sympathetic ophthalmia and then to total blindness. Because there were no special educational facilities for the blind in the provincial areas of France at that time, the child spent the next seven years of his life in a state of relative solitude.

In 1819, when Braille was ten years old, he received a scholarship that enabled him to go to the Royal Institute for the Blind in Paris. It was there that, at the age of fifteen, Braille helped develop a new system of tactile coded impressions that could be used by the blind both to read and to write. This work represented a vast improvement over earlier methods. Although some time passed before this invention gained widespread acceptance, Braille was such a model student at the institute that, once he earned his completion certificate, when he was seventeen, he was appointed as a teacher in the Institute for the Blind.

Life’s Work

As his career as a teacher progressed, Braille played a role in several of the changes that affected not only the organization but also the philosophy of education for the blind in France and other countries. Before 1784, when Valentin Haüy founded what would eventually become the National Institute for the Blind in Paris, few, if any, institutional provisions had existed for special assistance to the blind either in France or elsewhere in Europe or in the United States. This is not to say that the blind had not been the focus of considerable popular attention during prior generations. Indeed, Haüy and others associated with the new institute tried immediately to address some of the most important public-image questions that both he and, ultimately, Braille would face throughout their careers as educators of the blind.

One of these was the task of counteracting traditional prejudices, ranging from innocent pity or emotional compassion to open fear, visibly present among the majority of the population in their attitudes toward the blind. In Haüy’s generation, the methods used to achieve this end were not always effective. In some cases, for example, arguments were introduced that underlined special characteristics of the blind. When these had to do with presumed extraordinary talents possessed by the blind by dint of one missing sense (heightened capacities of sense perception through touch or hearing), educators of the blind could emphasize certain positive points. To a certain extent, this was being done at the institute when Braille began there as a student: Many blind children were given training in music, so they could “prove” to society that they had talents worthy of recognition and praise.

On the other hand, there was another stream of literature, supported in part by Haüy, that suggested that the blind possessed a distinct inner nature that touched the realm of the mysterious. Anyone with a tendency to react negatively to obvious differences between the blind and persons with normal vision might also have been tempted to interpret suggestions of this special characteristic more in negative than in positive terms.

Even before Braille came to the Institute for the Blind in Paris, a debate had already challenged the Société Philanthropique (the founding inspiration behind the institute) for offering only charitable assistance to the blind children who came under its care. Some argued that more practical attention needed to be given to preparing blind children for life as participating members of society. In Haüy’s generation, such pressures tended to focus on a list of so-called suitable occupations for which the blind could be trained. Most of these were simple manual trades that could be learned through the sense of touch.

In practical terms, the members of the institute knew that, in order for the transmission of intellectual knowledge to occur, some technical method needed to be found to enable the blind both to read the same texts that were available to the literate majority population and to write without assistance. The most obvious method—one that was already in use by the time Braille became a student at the institute—was to print texts with raised letters. Although the blind could thus follow any printed text by tactile progression, there were two disadvantages in this early system. First, the method was rather slow, because the full form of each letter was fairly complicated and difficult to feel. Second, because of the relative complexity of the forms of the letters, the likelihood of errors in reading, particularly if one tried to move rapidly, was fairly high.

On the other hand, those who insisted that fuller integration into so-called normal society would be a desirable by-product of educating the blind to read had also to keep other, less practical, considerations in mind. Prejudices against presumed special inner moral and psychological characteristics of the blind might rise if a communications system were devised for or by them that was not as immediately accessible to the “normal” majority as simple raised letters were. Haüy himself discovered, well before Braille made his contribution, that controversy would rise over any form of innovation that went further than the simple method of raised letters: Representation of sounds by raised symbols rather than letters (the Haüy method), for example, never became an established technique for teaching the blind to read.

There are several reasons why the work of Braille—which was technologically rather commonplace—needs to be placed in the wider context of the time and society in which he lived. Braille’s system of printing writing by means of a “code” of dots rather than actual letters was obviously meant to simplify the reading process for the blind. Because knowledge of what eventually came to be known as Braille involved mastery of a “secret” code, however, some of Braille’s contemporaries believed that the new system ran counter to the normal integrationist objectives that education for the blind was meant to serve. As a consequence, Braille techniques did not spread as rapidly or as widely as the modern observer, more accustomed to practical criteria for judging the effectiveness of technological innovations, might imagine.

Despite its rather slow start (Braille was not used, even in the institute where Braille taught, until 1829), progress toward the official adoption of the six-dot reading code was made gradually. By the mid- to late 1830’s, Braille’s insistence on the fact of increased teaching efficiency through the use of his system gained important recognition. A special school was founded on the outskirts of Paris (at Maisons Alfort), in which Braille was used exclusively. Later, as the success of the Maisons Alfort program became obvious, the school moved to the center of Paris, on the rue Bagnolet.

By the late 1840’s, the use of Braille was enhanced considerably by two new developments. First, in 1847 the first Braille printing press was invented and used in France, soon to be exported for use throughout Europe and the United States. Second, the French government decided to establish a series of branch schools for the blind that would use the same Braille methods as the Paris Institute to provide elementary levels of instruction through reading, as well as manual trade training at the departmental level. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, the most qualified graduates of these provincial elementary schools would qualify to continue their education in full academic subjects at the National Institute for the Blind in Paris.

Braille himself did not live to see the full effects of the application of his reading code for the blind. Because of health complications caused by tuberculosis, he was forced to retire from teaching at the institute in 1837. At the time of his death in January, 1852, Braille lived in seclusion and was a nearly forgotten man. His reputation as an important contributor to modern education came only in stages. In 1887, the town of Coupvray, Braille’s birthplace and the site of his grave, erected a monument to his memory in the center of the town square. In 1952, one century after his death, and at a time when the techniques he had pioneered were in use throughout the world, Braille’s remains were transferred from Coupvray to a place of national prestige in the Panthéon in Paris.

Significance

The life of Louis Braille is more representative in many respects of the history of an issue than the history of an individual personality. Before Braille’s time, both in France and elsewhere in Europe or the United States, institutions that cared for the blind functioned more as asylums than as places where useful trades could be taught. Intellectual stimuli, and even basic educational instruction, remained even more remote than possibilities for simple vocational training. Until an effective means of communication had been found, learning was restricted to areas concentrating on the senses of touch and/or hearing.

The importance of the contribution of Braille, therefore, should be considered not only in practical terms (development of a simplified system of representing the letters of the alphabet by means of a code of raised dots) but also for its effect on attitudes toward the types of schooling that have since become possible for the blind. Even though the use of Braille to teach reading was initially limited to special schools for the blind, an important difference was in the making: Those who had formerly had no access to normal texts, be they in literature or the sciences, were now able to prepare themselves for interaction with society. Eventually, as Braille became more common and less expensive as a system of printing, this movement in the direction of fuller social and intellectual integration of the blind went further. By the early stages of the twentieth century, the blind were able to attend regular schools and follow the same academic curricula as their fellow classmates, using the same books, printed in Braille for their special use.

Bibliography

Bickel, Lennard. Triumph over Darkness: The Life of Louis Braille. Sydney, Australia: Allen & Unwin Australia, 1988. A brief review of Braille’s life, one of the few Braille biographies written for adults, not children.

Davidson, Margaret. Louis Braille. New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1971. A work of historical fiction, designed mainly for young readers, recounting the life of Braille. In addition to Braille himself, the author portrays the people who influenced him as a youth in Coupvray and during his adult years.

Dixon, Judith, ed. Braille Into the Next Millennium. Washington, D.C.: National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, and Friends of Libraries for Blind and Physically Handicapped Individuals in North America, 2000. This 600-page anthology of articles examines the past and present uses of Braille and speculates about how the Braille system might be used in the twenty-first century. The discussion of the Braille system’s past uses includes information about Louis Braille’s birthplace and the system’s origins.

Hampshire, Barry. Working with Braille. Lausanne, Switzerland: UNESCO, 1981. This book updates the 1954 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) analysis of methods of adapting Braille for international use. It is particularly important for its discussion of the impact of technological changes that have facilitated rapid communication beyond the imagination of the original inventors of the Braille system.

Kugelmass, J. Alvin. Louis Braille: Windows for the Blind. New York: Julian Messner, 1951. Although this biography was designed for a popular reading audience, it is the result of fairly extensive research into relevant resources in French and other languages. These lend an impression of historical accuracy, as well as some sense of the technical details of Braille’s system, to what is otherwise a simple account of Braille’s life.

Mackenzie, Sir Clutha. World Braille Usage. Paris: UNESCO, 1953. Provides a historical review of the processes that were followed over a century’s time to alter the original Braille system to meet the needs of blind readers and writers of Asian and African languages. It includes a brief review of Braille’s life and work as well as a history of the World Braille Council.

Paulson, William R. Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind in France. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. A scholarly historical study of changing cultural values that affected French attitudes toward the blind from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Paulson’s book fully develops the question of prejudices, particularly toward the presumed mystical inner nature of the blind.