Ok, after doing some searching, I came up with a free choice blog topic that I never really thought of before. Who invented braille, the form of reading that blind people use? Well it just so happens to be Louis Braille.Louis Braille, an English born chap, became blind at the age of three. The young tyke accidentally stabbed himself in the eye with one of his father’s workshop tools, an awl. Before long, Louis’s other eye went blind due to a case of sympathetic ophthalmia. Sympathetic ophthalmia is a condition that can cause inflammation to one or both eyes after either eye has been punctured, resulting in a complete blindness in both eyes.When Louis was ten years old, he earned a scholarship to the National Institute for the Blind which is located in Paris. This school was one of the first of its kind in the world; Nobody had ever really bothered trying to teach a blind child before then. The school its self was not at all a dream though. Louis was served stale bread and water, and students were sometimes abused or locked up as for punishment. (what a blind kid could do that is bad enough to get locked in a closet I’ll never know)Louis was known to be a creative student. He became very talented with the cello and organ. He was so exceptional with his organ playing skills, that he was taken all over France to play for large crowds inside churches and cathedrals.At the school, the children were taught basic craftsman skills and simple trades. They were also taught how to read by feeling raised letters which was devised by the school's founder, Valentin Haüy. There was a major drawback to this system. The raised letters were made using paper pressed against copper wire which prevented the kids from learning to write. The letters also weighed a lot, and whenever people published books using this system, they put together a book with multiple stories in it in order to save money. This made the books weigh over a hundred pounds. The school had fourteen books, all of which Louis had read.In 1821, Charles Barbier, a Captain in the French Army, visited the school. Barbier shared his invention called "Night writing". This was an extremely complicated code of 12 raised dots on paper, and a series of dashes that let soldiers share information durin combat without actually having to speak. The code was too difficult for Louis to understand. Loius modified the number of raised dots to 6, and created what is known as Braille.Braille used his new communication system not only in reading and writing, but with mathematics and music. He eventually became a professor at the institute, and was loved and reverned by his pupils. He died in 1852 at the age of 43. He suffered from turbiculosis. At his cenntenary of his deathday, the U.S. issued Louis Braille silver coins. Today, Braille has been adapted to nearly every known language.I think that Louis Braille sounds like a pretty cool guy. I don’t much like the idea of all of those blind kids getting abused like that, but I suppose that was over a hundred years ago.
Comments