[il-talk] History of Braille

[Deborah Kent Stein]

Hi, Laura, great to see you on Il-Talk.  Glad you enjoyed the history of 
Braille article.  I found some of the quotes very interesting, especially 
the 19th-century blindness professionals who complained that Braille made 
blind people too independent!

Debbie

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Laura Glowacki" <orangebutterfly87 at gmail.com>
To: "NFB of Illinois Mailing List" <il-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 7:00 PM
Subject: Re: [il-talk] History of Braille


Thank you for sharing this, as I really enjoyed reading it.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Deborah Kent Stein" <dkent5817 at att.net>
To: "Multiple recipients of NFBnet il-talk Mailing List"
<il-talk at NFBnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 3:56 PM
Subject: [il-talk] History of Braille




I'm doing some research about Braille and its history, and came across this
interesting article.  Enjoy!

Debbie

Braille History

Enabling Technologies

Braille is our only business, and today, our computer-driven embossers
produce millions of pages of it in countries all over the world. But the
history
of Braille is rooted deep in times long past...

Home
How Braille Began

Between Crusades

The improbable chain of circumstance that would give birth to Braille began
after King Louis the Ninth of France suffered a crushing defeat in the Sixth
Crusade. Already a religious man, Louis returned to Paris certain that God
was making him suffer to teach him humility, which intensified his interest
in charity. Among other good works, he endowed one of the first formal
institutions for the blind in the world in the year 1260, the
"Quinze-Vingts" hospice
(in English, "fifteen score" or 300).

This name supposedly referred to the first inhabitants, said to be 300
French knights whose eyes were put out as a punishment by the Saracens
during the
failed crusade. This horrific tale is not true; it originated two centuries
later in a fund-raising letter to the Pope. After the story was printed in
a book in 1499, however, legend kept it alive for 500 years. This may mark
another first--institutional fund-raising as modern people would recognize
it.

The Quinze-Vingts did provide a unique shelter and community for blind
Parisians. The largely self-governing hospice officially licensed its blind
inhabitants
as beggars in uniform, apparently as a kind of accreditation council in a
world that feared being "cheated" by able-bodied frauds. The inhabitants
(who
never reached 300 in number at any one time)  led lives that were more
regulated but probably more secure than those of many of their
contemporaries. Residents
kept some of the proceeds of their own begging, but had to leave a portion
of their property, upon their deaths, to the hospice.

King Louis the Ninth could not resist another attempt at a crusade in 1270.
Almost at once, he died of dysentery when a fever swept the French camp in
Tunis.
In 1297, the Church canonized him as "St. Louis." He would also one day have
a city named after him that, in an odd coincidence, would play an important
role in the acceptance of Braille.

One Day at the Fair

St. Ovid's Fair was one of Paris's lively and popular religious street
festivals. Beginning in 1665, the Fair ran from August 14 to September 15
each year
and featured merchants, puppet shows, tightrope walkers, jugglers, animal
acts, and food vendors. By the 1770's, the fair moved to the Place de la
Concorde,
near today's Hotel Le Crillon. In 1771, a young man named Valentin Haüy
visited St. Ovid's Fair and stopped at a cafe for lunch. What he saw there
would
change not only his own life, but the lives of millions of blind people,
forever.

In a crowd-pleasing gimmick that appeared only that year, a group of eight
blind men from the Quinze-Vingts were performing a slapstick comedy act,
pretending
to be what many other blind people actually were--musicians. They wore dunce
caps and huge cardboard glasses. A ninth man in a red dress and donkey's
ears
hung from the ceiling and beat time, suspended on a perch shaped like a
peacock. The "musicians" clowned for the crowd by singing and making
squawking,
discordant noises on old violins.

The act was a hit. An almanac published a few years later said, "One could
not have an idea of the success which this joke obtained," but Haüy felt "a
very
different sentiment" and was so sickened by the performance that he could
not finish his lunch.

Valentin Haüy was born in 1745 into a family of weavers. His father worked
full-time at the loom and got a second job ringing the Angelus bells at the
nearby
Premonstrant Abbey. The monks there educated both Valentin and his talented
brother, Renè-Just, who became a famed scientist. Valentin became a skilled
linguist who spoke ten living languages in addition to ancient Greek and
Hebrew. In 1783 he was named interpreter to the king.

Haüy became acquainted with Abbé de l'Epée, founder of the first school for
the deaf (also in Paris), and learned the manual alphabet. Haüy's own
idealism
and energy would prove extraordinary, and so, initially, would his luck. In
the spring of 1784, while on another walk in Paris, he encountered the
perfect
student.

In the most popular version of the story, as Haüy departed Saint Germain des
Prés church after services in 1784, he pressed a coin into the hand of a
young
blind boy begging near the entrance of the church. The boy instantly called
out the denomination, believing Haüy had accidentally given him too large a
sum. Haüy then had a startling insight: The blind could learn a great deal,
perhaps even reading, using the sense of touch. This tale of a waif being
plucked
"from the gutter," as one author put it, may also not be true. There is some
evidence the young beggar had heard of Haüy's interest in educating the
blind
and by some means was able to put himself in the path of opportunity.

However they met, the beggar, 17-year-old François Lesueur, became Haüy's
first pupil. François had been blind since infancy and had spent much of his
short
life begging on the streets to support his parents and five siblings. Haüy
made up François' lost earnings from begging while he taught him to read by
using wooden letters he moved around to form words. François was a very
quick study and also the source of a major new insight. While looking for
some
object on Haüy's desk, François ran his hand over a funeral card on which
the printed letter "o" was struck unusually hard, raising it enough to
decipher
by touch. Within six months his mastery of the basic elements of primary
education stunned France's top scholars and scientists when Haüy brought him
for
a demonstration at the Royal Academy.
Saint Germain des Prés, where Valentin Haüy first encountered François
Lesueur

A School for the Blind

Haüy made the most of this triumph, soliciting help from celebrities of the
day, such as Maria Theresia von Paradis, a young blind girl with an
international
reputation as a piano prodigy. She shared her own literacy methods, which
included a writing system of pinpricks. Maria also told Haüy of her
correspondence
with a talented blind German student named Weissenbourg, who acquired
considerable education through the resourcefulness of his tutor, Christian
Niesen.
Among Niesen's devices were a bent-wire alphabet and tactile maps made from
silk embroidered onto cardboard. He also used a board similar to that of
Nicholas
Saunderson, the blind British mathematician who had devised his own system
for working out complex calculations. Saunderson, unfortunately, left no
instructions
on how the board worked. After his death, his own family had to ask one of
his colleagues how to use it in order to publish his last book.

Haüy originally operated the school from his home, but as more pupils came,
he was able to attract sufficient royal support to expand. He moved the
school
first to the Rue Coquilliere and then to the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires.
Haüy soon had 48 pupils, both boys and girls. Fourteen married couples
eventually
formed within the student body. Within two years, the Academy of Music
sponsored benefit concerts for the school while Haüy kept the royal funds
flowing
by taking the blind students to Versailles to entertain the king at
Christmas with demonstrations of reading, arithmetic, and using tactile
maps. Since
the school had almost at once established a print shop run by the students
to make embossed books, Haüy had them make up a run of specially bound
"samples"
for the nobles at Court. The text was Haüy's own landmark book, An Essay On
The Education Of The Blind. One of these court performances was attended by
Marquis d'Orvilliers, a nobleman from a small village east of
Paris--Coupvray.

The Arrival of Number 70

More than 20 years later in Coupvray was born Louis Braille, the fourth
child of a saddle maker. In 1812 at the age of 3, Louis injured his eye in
an accident
while playing with his father's tools. One local legend has it that the
distraction that caused Louis' father to leave his workbench unattended
(with its
dangerous attractions for a curious toddler) was the news of Napoleon's army
leaving France for the disastrous invasion of Russia.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the ministrations of the local healer, an
old woman who first treated Louis' damaged eye with lily water, and those of
an
eye doctor in a nearby town, infection set in. Other ineffective treatments
followed, including a dose of calomel, a laxative. Over the next year, the
infection spread to the other eye. Louis Braille gradually went blind.

To add to the troubles of the Braille family, Napoleon's constant war with
the rest of Europe caused their town to be overrun by armies--not only the
retreating
French, but their enemies, the Prussians and the Russians. Over the two
years from 1814 to 1816, a constant stream of soldiers camped in the
Brailles'
modest three-room home. Their never-ending demands for food, animals, and
lodging caused severe hardship for the whole town. By 1816, war deprivations
wore down the health of the citizens, and a smallpox epidemic sprang up.
People, including Louis Braille's father, did not trust the
government-promoted
vaccinations, and many in the town fell ill.

Fortunately, at about the same time, other new people also came to
Coupvray--a priest, Abbé Jacques Palluy, and a schoolmaster, Antoine
Bécheret. They came
to know Louis well and came up with the then revolutionary idea of allowing
him to attend regular school. Both Louis' parents could read and write, and
his older siblings had all attended the same school as children. Louis did
so well there that when the government decreed new local school methods that
would have prevented Louis from continuing his education, Bécheret and
Palluy approached the local nobleman for help.

The nobleman was Marquis d'Orvilliers, a survivor of the recent smallpox
epidemic, who, having seen Valentin Haüy's students perform at Versailles
years
before, agreed to write to the current director of the school, Sébastien
Guillié. Louis' parents were not initially convinced that school in Paris
was
a good idea, but they were eventually persuaded, and Louis received a
scholarship. In February, 1819, 10-year-old Louis and his father made the
four-hour
stagecoach trip to Paris.

Louis became the youngest student at the school and was assigned Number 70,
which was attached to his bed with the straw mattress and to his locker, as
well as to a badge he wore on his new uniform. This regimentation of
identity was not the only change for the school since the happier times
thirty years
before under Valentin Haüy.

After the revolution, many of the nobles who had once helped the school were
themselves killed, jailed or in flight from France. For a time, the school
moved to a series of different venues and eventually shared an abandoned
convent with the school for the deaf, with unhappy results. The blind
students
ultimately were forced into the Quinze-Vingts, now overcrowded, chaotic, and
the home of last resort for elderly blind beggars.

Dr. Guillié, running the school for the blind at the time of Louis'
admission, was an ophthalmologist by vocation who had founded the first eye
clinic in
Paris. He subsequently survived the many changes of government during the
French Revolution, the Napoleonic era, and the Bourbon restoration.

Guillié's interest in reestablishing the school for the blind once the king
returned to power was only mildly humanitarian, for he reclaimed only the
most
promising students from the Quinze-Vingts and sometimes used students in
highly questionable medical experiments. He also made a fateful choice of
buildings--the
former St. Firmin seminary on Rue Saint-Victor.

The old seminary was by then already over 500 years old and had endured hard
use as, among other things, an orphanage founded by St. Vincent dePaul (the
patron saint of charitable societies) and a house of ill repute. During the
worst times of the Revolution, St. Firmin's was used as a prison for
uncooperative
priests and others with ties to the old regime (including, briefly, Valentin
Haüy's own brother) who refused to swear allegiance to the new government.
In a systematic massacre lasting several days, the imprisoned priests were
murdered there in 1792. The interior was dank, cramped, and in poor repair,
with narrow stairwells, tiny rooms and walls clammy to the touch. It smelled
of mildew and other "putrid emanations".

St. Firmin, however, had one surpassing charm for Guillié. Its existing
floor plan enabled strict and total segregation of the sexes, which was of
great
importance to him. He even appointed a new strict female headmistress to
supervise the girls.

Guillié was careful to document not only his many administrative tasks in
the operation of the school, but much of his personal philosophy as well.
The
year Louis Braille was admitted, Guillié referred to blind people as, among
other things, "degraded beings, condemned to vegetate on the earth."

Not much vegetating went on during Guillié's tenure, and for the most
predictable of reasons. Goods the students produced were sold in Paris shops
and produced
a vital stream of revenue, thus creating the first sheltered workshop.
Guillié instituted harsh schedules and discipline to drive up productivity.
Among
their other skills, the students wove the fabric for their own uniforms,
which were, depending on the account, either blue or black. They made
slippers,
buggy whips, fishing nets, and straw chair bottoms. Ever enterprising,
Guillié also obtained a contract for the school to weave sheets for Paris'
huge
system of public hospitals. The size of this task becomes apparent in light
of the fact that the largest of these hospitals, La Salpêtrière, had a
capacity
of more than 10,000 inmates.

For teaching, Guillié had relied heavily on older students acting as tutors
or "repeaters" to give lessons verbally to younger students. Although the
"repeaters"
did not know it, Guillié had some success in reestablishing government
support for the school and received a small stipend for the older students'
instructional
time, which he personally pocketed.

The "students" were essentially confined in a workhouse as bleak as any in a
Dickens novel. Classes and work occupied a rigidly scheduled thirteen-hour
day. Students had one bath a month, scarce heat, and poor food, mostly beans
and porridge. The school's muddy drinking water was unfiltered, direct from
the River Seine. A dinner of dry bread (served in solitary confinement
lasting up to two days) was a standard punishment for rule infractions.
Guillié
explained his methods as supremely enlightened, because, "all blind people
have a decided taste for independence and liberty. Nothing, however, is more
contrary to their real interests than the use of a thing which they could
only abuse. The art of those, therefore, who are with them, consists less in
satisfying them than in making them believe they are satisfied."

Guillié's direction of the school had one bright spot. He apparently had a
personal love of music, and thus, music lessons were compulsory for all
students.
However much Guillié boasted of scrimping on food and heat, he spared no
effort finding instruments for a school orchestra and recruiting excellent
volunteer
teachers from among local musical professionals. For students who were
naturally talented, this was probably the happiest part of their school
years.

Louis Braille adjusted quickly to the life at school and made the first of
the many friends there he would keep all his life, fellow student Gabriel
Gauthier,
who was one year older.

First Books for Blind Readers

The few wealthy potential patrons who remained were often taken on tours
through the school and workshop, with the students' reading of the few
embossed
books a highlight of the trip. Haüy's original method of embossing books was
to apply soaked paper to raised letter forms, so that the tactile shape of
the specially crafted large round cursive letters remained after the paper
dried. Pages were then glued back-to-front to produce a two-sided sheet.
These
books were, of course, extraordinarily slow and difficult to make--and
almost as slow and difficult to read, since the shape of each letter had to
be traced
individually. The finished books were often too heavy for the smaller
students to lift. At the time of Louis Braille's admission, the school, now
over
thirty years old, had one hundred pupils and a total of fourteen embossed
books.

The school was now under the control of a committee selected by the Ministry
of the Interior and dominated by a clique of nobles, to whom Dr. Guillié
reported.
In 1821, it became apparent that Guillié was indeed right to fear the power
of sex, although not because of anything the students did. He himself was
abruptly
fired by the Ministry for having a love affair with the female headmistress,
who may have become pregnant.

The school's new director, André Pignier, was horrified by the decrepit
building and immediately resolved to improve conditions, first instituting
two outings
a week so students could breathe fresh air and get some exercise away from
their desks and workbenches. Students began to travel through the city, all
gripping one long rope as a guide, to attend mass on Sunday at St. Nicholas
du Chardonnet church and to go on a Thursday afternoon excursion to a local
botanical park.
St. Nicholas du Chardonnay, where the blind students attended church, is
still there today.

Another Pignier reform was to stage a public celebration of the school's
history, at which the guest of honor would be founder Valentin Haüy. Haüy,
now
an old man, had not been inside the school in years. Losing control of the
school in the aftermath of the revolution, he struggled to maintain some
teaching
activity with private students and to survive on a small government pension.
Finally, dismissed by Napoleon in 1802, he left France, accompanied by one
of his most promising students, Alexandre Fournier. Together they spent over
a decade in exile working with blind students in other European countries,
including a long, frustrating stay in Russia trying to start a school there.
Schools for the blind were an idea who time had definitely come, with
Liverpool
(1791), Vienna (1804), Berlin (1806), Amsterdam (1808), Dresden (1809),
Zurich (1810), and Copenhagen (1811) appearing in rapid succession using
many of
Haüy's ideas and methods. Upon his return to France, Haüy, exhausted,
destitute, and himself nearly blind, had been banned from the school by the
unsympathetic
Guillié.

On the day of the ceremony to honor Haüy, Louis Braille, now 12, along with
several other students, gave a musical program of songs from the school's
early
days and a reading demonstration using the original embossed books. Sometime
that day, Haüy, now 76, and young Louis Braille may have met face to face.
The following year, Louis Braille was one of a small group from the school
to attend Haüy's meager funeral.
Valentin Haüy's print embossed letters were widely spaced and used ornate
fonts

Too Tough for the Artillery?

Another visitor a short time later would have an equally large influence on
Louis Braille's future. Charles Barbier de la Serre was another quick-witted
survivor of the political turmoil that engulfed France. Barbier was the son
of the controller of the farms of the king and was admitted to a royal
military
academy in 1782. He fled the Revolution by spending some time in the United
States as a land-surveyor in Indian territory and returned to France by
1808,
where he joined Napoleon's army and published a table for quick writing or
"expediography," followed a year later by a book describing how to write
several
copies of a message at once.

Barbier's interest in fast, secret writing was grounded in his war
experiences. The French army under Napoleon had been defeated for the last
time at Waterloo
in 1815, but before that, they had nearly conquered Europe and were
considered even by their enemies to be the best artillerymen in the world.
Barbier
had once seen all the troops in a forward gun post annihilated when they
betrayed their position by lighting a single lamp to read a message. A
tactile
system for sending and receiving messages could be useful not only at night,
but in maintaining communications during combat with its unique horrors for
artillery crews. Dense, blinding smoke and thunderous noise combined to
create hellish confusion. If the horses that transported the huge guns were
hit,
the surviving crew would find itself immobilized in a tangle of guns,
harnesses and dead or dying animals with no means of escape as the bullets
flew.

Barbier and the students of the Institution for Blind Children probably
first encountered each other when both were exhibiting their communication
methods
at the Museum of Science and Industry, then located in the Louvre. Barbier
had a device that enabled the writer to create messages in the dark; the
students
were reading, with the usual painful slowness, Haüy's books of embossed
print letters.

Barbier decided to take his own dot- and dash-based "night writing"
artillery code to the Royal Institution for Blind Children and interested
Pignier, the
new director, in his system. Pignier arranged a demonstration and passed
around a few embossed pages of dots to the students.

Louis Braille was thunderstruck when he first touched the dots of the
night-writing samples. He had often played around with tactile writing at
home on
summer vacation in Coupvray. Neighbors later recalled that as a child Louis
had tried leather in various shapes and even arranged upholstery pins in
patterns,
hoping to find a workable tactile communication method, but with no success.

Once he touched the dots, he knew he had found his medium and quickly
learned to use Barbier's "ruler," which greatly resembles a more complex
version of
today's slate. He, his friend Gabriel, and other boys at the school taught
each other the code by writing each other messages back and forth.

Louis was also quick to see the problems with Barbier's system, which was
never actually used by the army. Sonography used a huge cell, more than a
fingertip
can cover. The cells stood for 36 basic sounds instead of letters. A large
customized board, laid out six cells across and six cells down, was used to
write the sound symbols. There were no punctuation marks, numbers or musical
signs, and there were horizontal dashes in addition to the dots.
Barbier cell. Originally, b was 4 dots--z was 9. The entire cell was 12
dots, twice as tall as today's Braille cell.

When Louis met with Captain Barbier to talk about his ideas to improve the
code, the Captain, by now in his mid fifties, was probably at first
incredulous
and then annoyed at having his ideas questioned by someone so young,
inexperienced, and blind as well. Now that Napoleon's adventures of military
conquest
were ended, it seems likely Barbier had hopes of obtaining some kind of
government recognition for the invention on which he had worked so long if
it were
adopted by the blind.

Intimidated by the Captain, Louis stopped asking his advice altogether and
instead went to work experimenting with the code on his own. He had little
spare
time; he won prizes that semester in geography, history, mathematics, and
piano while also working as the foreman of the slipper shop at the school.
Still,
late at night and at home in Coupvray during the summer, Louis tried various
modifications that would enable the unique letter symbols to fit under one
fingertip.

In October, 1824, Louis, now 15 years old, unveiled his new alphabet right
after the start of school. He had found sixty-three ways to use a six-dot
cell,
though some dashes were still included. His new alphabet was received
enthusiastically by the other students and by Pignier, who ordered the
special slates
Louis had designed from Captain Barbier's original one. Gabriel Gauthier,
still Louis' best friend, was probably the very first person ever to read
Braille.

The obvious usefulness and popularity of Louis' invention did not make other
parts of the students' lives easier. Bad times in France in 1825 caused the
school's rations of fuel to shrink and the already-spare diet was reduced to
bread and soup. The sighted teachers resented the new code, with its implied
demand that they learn something so alien. Worried for their own jobs, they
complained that the sound of punching was disrupting classes. The school had
finally achieved some financial stability with a government stipend from the
Ministry of the Interior, but in 1826, the school bookkeeper fled after
embezzling
an amount equal to one-half the annual budget.

Pignier appealed to the Ministry repeatedly over the next several years for
repair or replacement of the deteriorating building. His requests were
usually
ignored, though medical inspectors visited the school in both 1821 and 1828
and reported dutifully and ineffectually that "mortality among the students
is high."

Pignier arranged for Louis to become an organ student at a local church. The
tradition of excellent musical training at the school has produced many
first-rate
professional organists, right down to our own day. By Louis' time, over
fifty graduates were playing in churches around Paris. Louis proved an
exceptionally
talented musician, was heard (and praised) by Felix Mendelssohn, and a few
years later obtained the first of several jobs as a church organist.

First Books in Braille

Pignier created still another opportunity for Louis, appointing him the
first blind apprentice teacher at the school. Louis taught algebra, grammar,
music,
and geography. Despite his busy schedule, he kept tinkering with the code.
By 1828, he had found a way to copy music in his new code and eliminated the
dashes.

In 1829, at age 20, he published Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain
Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them, his
first
complete book about his new system. A few years later, he, Gabriel Gauthier
and another blind friend and former pupil, Hippolyte Coltat, became the
first
blind full professors at the school. This meant they could leave the school
occasionally without asking permission, got their own rooms, and had gold
braid
added to their uniforms as a mark of rank. All three new teachers used the
new alphabet in their classes.

The same year, Louis Braille was drafted and was represented at the
recruiting board by his father. A census record of this encounter shows that
Louis was
exempt from the French army because he was blind, as a result of which he
"could not read or write," an ironic footnote for someone who had largely
solved
one of the great problems of literacy before he was out of his teens.

Spending so much of his life in the unhealthy school building and living on
a poor diet caused Louis to develop tuberculosis in his mid-twenties. The
diagnosis
probably did not surprise him. For years, his fellow students had become ill
in such numbers that a visitor complained that the students could barely
stand
for long in a straight line for all the coughing and wheezing.

For the rest of his life, Louis had periods of health and energy
interspersed with terrifying hemorrhages and near-fatal collapses. Still,
despite his illness,
teaching load, and several jobs playing the organ, he worked on at refining
the code. Although French does not use a "W," Louis added it later at the
request
of an English student, the blind son of Sir George Hayter, portraitist to
the British royal family. He worked hard on the Braille music code as well,
probably
spurred not only by his own musical abilities, but by those of his friends.
Gabriel Gauthier was a composer as well as an organist, who would eventually
produce his own work among the first volumes of Braille music.

First "Braille-Print" System

Louis was a popular teacher, generous to his students with both time and
money. He made many personal gifts and loans from his small salary to help
them
buy warm clothes and better food. He also saved enough to buy himself a
piano so he could practice whenever he wished. Because students typically
had no
way of writing home to their families without dictating a letter to a
sighted teacher, Louis invented "raphigraphy", a system which represents the
alphabet
with large print letters composed of Braille dots. Raphigraphy was
labor-intensive--the letter "I" alone required the Braillist to punch 16
dots. A blind
inventor, Pierre Foucault, had been a student at the school back in the
Quinze-Vingts days. He returned in 1841 and when he saw what Louis Braille
was
doing, invented a machine called a "piston board," to punch complete
dot-drawn letters. In 1847, he would invent the "keyboard printer"
(essentially, a
typewriter) enabling blind people to write to sighted people in black type.
Louis Braille used it to compose letters to his mother back in Coupvray.

Ironically, the first working print typewriter had actually been devised in
1808 in Italy to help a blind countess produce legible writing for sighted
people,
but print typewriters were not produced on any scale until the 1870's. In
the meantime, the piston board (although expensive) itself became a common
device
throughout Europe.
The letter I in raphigraphy--4 horizontal dots on top and bottom, and 8
vertical in 2 rows in the middle

In 1834, Pignier arranged for Louis to demonstrate his code at the Paris
Exposition of Industry, attended by visitors from all over the world. King
Louis-Philippe
of France presided over the opening of the show and even spoke with Louis
about his invention, but, like other observers, including officials from the
Ministry of the Interior that supervised the school, did not seem to
understand what he saw.

Louis revised the book on his alphabet in 1837, the same year the students
at the school published the first Braille textbook in the world, a
three-volume
history of France. The school print shop was directed by Alexandre Fournier,
the student Valentin Haüy had brought along on his flight from France over
thirty years before.

What's Best--and Who Decides?

Blind students must have found it electrifying to be able to write and read
for the first time with speed and accuracy equaling or exceeding that of
many
sighted people, and it must have been thrilling to observe. The full extent
of this triumph completely eluded authorities of the time, however. Neither
Louis' book nor the students' new history of France in Braille was the most
heralded publishing project at the school in the year 1837.

Assistant director P. Armand Dufau, a former geography teacher at the
school, published The Blind: Considerations On Their Physical, Moral And
Intellectual
State, With A Complete Description Of The Means Suitable To Improve Their
Lot Using Instruction And Work. Dufau's book won the prestigious prize from
the
Académie Française which the year before had been awarded to Alexis de
Tocqueville for his well-known book on America.

Dufau, a staunch Braille opponent who believed the code made the blind "too
independent," included no mention of Louis Braille's innovation in his book.
The prize from the Académie meant Dufau found his own fortunes sharply on
the rise, and he may have used some of his new influence to get a better
building
for the school at last. In 1838, poet and historian Alphonse de Lamartine
toured the school and was horrified by the squalor. He made a powerful
appeal
to France's Chamber of Deputies for a new building, declaring, "No
description could give you a true idea of this building, which is small,
dirty, and
gloomy; of those passages partitioned off to form boxes dignified by the
name of workshops or classrooms, of those many tortuous, worm-eaten
staircases...If
this whole assembly was to rise now and go en masse to this place, the vote
for this bill would be unanimous!" Plans finally commenced for a new school
building across town.

Louis' deteriorating health forced him to turn down a job in a mountain
locale that might have lengthened his life had he had the stamina to make
the journey--tutor
to a blind prince of the Austrian royal family. At last, he took a long
leave of absence to regain strength in Coupvray. Meanwhile, Dufau intrigued
with
officials at the Ministry of the Interior and forced Pignier from his
position.

When Louis returned to the school, he found more bad news. Dufau, now
director, was making more changes, among them deleting "frivolous" subjects
like history,
Latin, and geometry from the curriculum. Dufau had sufficient official
support to obtain a large budget increase for the school and decided to
revolutionize
the school's standard reading medium--not using Braille's code but adopting
a British system invented by John Alston of the Asylum for the Blind in
Glasgow.
Another print-like tactile system, Alston type differed from Haüy type in
that it used very simplified letter forms without swirls or serifs, similar
to
the modern Orator typewriter font. Alston had printed an entire Bible (in 19
volumes) using this new system a few years before and Dufau was greatly
impressed
with it.
Alston type, which looks kind of like Letter Gothic or IBM Orator

A Book-Burning and a Rebellion

To enforce the new system, Dufau burned many of the embossed books created
by Haüy's original process and every book he found printed or hand
transcribed
in Louis' new code--the school's entire library and the product of nearly
fifty years' work. To make sure no Braille would ever again be used at the
school,
he also confiscated the slates, styli, and other Braille-writing equipment.

Outraged, the students rebelled. Behind Dufau's back, they wrote Braille
even without slates. They sent messages and kept secret diaries written with
knitting
needles, forks and nails. Dufau's punishments for Braille use, which
included being slapped and starved, were completely ineffective. The older
students
taught the younger ones the system in secret. Braille, once learned, proved
impossible to suppress.

Finally, Dufau's shrewd assistant, Joseph Guadet, had been watching the
students and became an ardent Braille supporter, teaching himself to read
and write
the code. He must have persuaded Dufau that if powerful people in government
heard that the students were unified in willfully defying Dufau's authority,
his job might be at risk. If, however, a student invented something
successful, the school would share the credit, which could only enhance the
reputation
of its director.

So, when the school moved into its new building in November, 1843, P. Armand
Dufau was a changed man, supplying every student with a new Braille slate.
Euphoric at having defeated the Braille ban, students got up a petition and
sent it to the government nominating Louis Braille for the French Legion of
Honor for making true communication possible for the blind. The petition,
however, was ignored.

Reversal of Fortune

Louis' public triumph would finally come at the new building's dedication
ceremony the following February. Dufau glowingly described Louis Braille's
system
of writing with raised dots, even having students give a demonstration. An
official in the audience cried out that it was all a trick, that the child
writing
Braille and a second child (who had been out of the room for the dictation)
reading it back must have memorized the text in advance. In reply, Dufau
asked
the man to find some printed material in his pocket, which turned out to be
a theater ticket, and to read it to the student Braillist. The little girl
reproduced the text and another child read it back flawlessly before the man
even returned to his seat. The crowd, convinced, applauded wildly for a full
six minutes.

Louis Braille spent the last eight years of his life teaching occasionally
and Brailling books for the school library as he battled his declining
health.
People were starting to call the dot system by his name, "Braille," and a
growing number of inquiries about it were reaching the school from all over
the
world. When Dufau published the second edition of his influential book in
1850, he devoted several enthusiastic pages to the Braille system. Still,
when
Louis Braille died on January 6, 1852, just two days past his forty-third
birthday, not a single Paris newspaper noted his passing.

His system survived, and in 1854, France adopted Braille as its official
communications system for blind people. At the school, Braille's friends and
former
students energetically evolved new ways of working with the code. Victor
Ballu experimented with a phonetic shorthand system, and in concert with
Levitte,
used two-sided stereotyping as early as 1867. In 1880, Levitte published a
guide to the code using the same numbering system for the position of the
six
dots (calling the letter "a" dot 1 and so forth) that we still use today. By
the late 1880's, Ballu had devised a true interpointing scheme for printing
two-sided pages.

Levitte went on to become a beloved superintendent at the school but
unfortunately, died suddenly in 1883. A student at the time, Louis Vierne,
later a
famous organist, reflected bitterly that the system for choosing directors
was still erratic, writing that Levitte's successor was, "a vain and stupid
brute who understood utterly nothing of his proper role; he treated us like
prisoners, and used to boast of how much he despised us."

The Braille system spread to Switzerland soon after but encountered
tremendous resistance in other countries, and often for the same reason:
Braille's seeming
opacity to the sighted because of its lack of resemblance to print. The fact
that the blind might want to write because they had something to say, as
well
as read what others have written, incredibly seems never to have occurred to
many of these educators. The writing factor--Braille is easy to write
manually,
while raised print letter forms are nearly impossible--was a huge factor in
securing Braille's lasting place in its users' hearts.

A later Braille reader, Helen Keller, wrote: "Braille has been a most
precious aid to me in many ways. It made my going to college possible--it
was the
only method by which I could take notes of lectures. All my examination
papers were copied for me in this system. I use Braille as a spider uses its
web--to
catch thoughts that flit across my mind for speeches, messages and
manuscripts." If Louis Braille had ever had the time to write his own
thoughts on solving
problems, dealing with hardship, and persevering through setbacks, few would
deny that would have been a story well worth reading, regardless of what
medium
originally held the words.

Curiously, many educators of the blind seem to have made a highly personal
mission out of devising conflicting codes with little regard for their
practical
implications. Ferocious, competitive partisanship developed over these code
systems, usually with no input from potential readers.

The United Kingdom seems to have been the one bright exception. Thomas
Rhodes Armitage, a wealthy physician who struggled with vision problems
himself,
convened a committee of other blind people "with knowledge of at least three
systems of embossed type and having no financial interest in any" to
evaluate
the various codes and make a decision on which one would be best for
Britain. During the two years the committee deliberated, they surveyed
dozens of blind
readers. Two years later, in 1870, Braille won, though it was many years
more before it was fully implemented.

While many of the competing codes did not thrive much past the end of the
19th century, the innovators they attracted often did move Braille
publishing
forward in unexpected ways. William Bell Wait, superintendent of the New
York Institute for the Blind, energetically promoted a now almost forgotten
code
called "New York Point" in 1868. New York Point was a cell two dots high
with a varying cell width and was used for years in book and magazine
production.

Though New York Point was eventually eclipsed by Braille, Wait more
lastingly gave an eloquent argument in the Senate Education Committee that
helped secure
the first annual grant from Congress for embossed books for the blind in
1879, thus securing an important financial channel for publishing for the
blind
in the United States.

The first American institution to adopt Braille was, ironically, the
Missouri School for the Blind, located in St. Louis--a city named for Louis
the Ninth,
Crusader king of France. Dr. Simon Pollak, a member of the school's board,
had earlier traveled to France and was much impressed with the Braille
system.
By some unknown means, students at the school learned Braille independently
and taught it to each other after school hours, using it to pass notes to
confound
their sighted teachers.

Initially, the superintendent of the Missouri school resisted the use of
Braille, saying it was "not pleasing to the eye," but his opposition did not
stand.
The school adopted Braille officially in 1860.
New York Point

Modern Times

The Quinze-Vingts still exists today and is now a high-tech ophthalmologic
hospital, as well as a residence for the blind.

The wooden stalls and benches used for St. Ovid's Fair were destroyed in a
fire in 1777. By 1793, the only spectacle there was the guillotine. Over
1,000
executions took place there, including those of King Louis the Sixteenth and
Queen Marie Antoinette.

Valentin Haüy is one of the great humanitarians (joining, among others,
Abraham Lincoln, St. Francis of Assisi, and Florence Nightingale)
immortalized in
the stone carvings adorning New York City's Riverside Church. His life and
work are also remembered in a museum on Rue Duroc in modern Paris, open
Tuesday
and Wednesday from 2:30-5 p.m, closed from July 1st to September 15th
annually. Admission is free.

François Lesueur, the beggar who was Haüy's original student, became the
printer at the school, a teacher, and later the treasurer.

The former St. Firmin's seminary on Rue Saint-Victor served as an army
barracks and a warehouse before it was finally torn down in the 1930's. The
last
building Louis Braille would have known and where he died on the Rue des
Invalides is still the location of the school for the blind today.
The 1843 school is a large, imposing 3-story building with tall windows
fronting a main street

Joseph Guadet, one of the first sighted people to learn Braille, would
found, edit, and publish a journal entitled Teacher of the Blind and would
write
several books, including a history of the school. His primary mission,
however, was always the promotion of Louis Braille's system. He famously
declared
that Braille himself was "far too modest.to insist on the rightful place for
his code in the life of the blind. We had to do it for him!"

Guadet's history was also not the earliest one written about the school. A
student named Galliod in 1828 wrote Notice historique sur l'établissement
des
jeune aveugles (Paris: Imprimé aux Quinze-Vingts). One cardboard-bound copy
exists in original Haüy type at the Association Valentin Haüy in Paris.

Louis Braille was also not the only ground-breaking alumnus of the school's
early days. In 1830, Claude Montal taught himself the craft of tuning on an
old piano while a student at the school and eventually started a highly
successful program to teach this lucrative skill to other students. By 1834
he
had published "How to Tune Your Piano Yourself" and went on to open his own
shop. The school has also produced an unprecedented stream of world-famous
organists that continues right up to our own time, including Louis Vierne,
André Marchal, and Jean Langlais. Among the present organists at Notre-Dame
Cathedral is Jean-Pierre Leguay, who is also blind.

Louis Braille's will, dictated to a notary less than a week before his
death, included bequests not only to his family, but to the servant who
cleaned his
room, the infirmary aide, and the night watchman at the school. His clothes
and personal belongings went to his students as mementos. He made one odd
request,
instructing friends to burn a small box in his room without opening it.
After his death, they were unable to resist a peek and found the box stuffed
with
IOUs in Braille from students who had borrowed money from their generous
teacher. The notes were finally burned in keeping with his wishes.

Upon Louis Braille's death, Hippolyte Coltat served as his executor,
inherited his piano and worked hard to advance his legacy. His warm
recollections of
his teacher and friend at a memorial service at the school served as
Braille's first biography. Gabriel Gauthier outlived Louis by only a short
time. He
also died of tuberculosis.

Louis Braille's writing system eventually spread throughout the world and,
of course, became known by his name. Curiously, considering that Louis'
father
was a harness and saddle maker, there is an English word, brail, which
describes a rope used in sailing and is derived from a 15th century French
word
braiel, meaning "strap." Thus, it seems reasonable to speculate that the
family name was may have derived from an ancestor's similar occupation.

The Braille home in Coupvray, a short distance from EuroDisney, has become a
museum. Louis Braille was originally buried in a simple grave in the small
cemetery in his hometown. In 1952, on the one-hundredth anniversary of his
death, public feeling grew that his remains should be moved to the Pantheon
in Paris, where France's national heroes are buried. The mayor of Coupvray
protested that Louis Braille was a true child of the area and that some of
him
should remain in his home village. His hands were separated from his arms
and re-buried in Coupvray.

The rest of his body was interred in the Pantheon following a huge public
ceremony at the Sorbonne attended by dignitaries from all over the world,
including
Helen Keller, who gave a speech in what the New York Times reported as
"faultlessly grammatical" French. She declared, to a rousing ovation from
the hundreds
of other Braille readers in attendance, that "we, the blind, are as indebted
to Louis Braille as mankind is to Gutenberg".

As the coffin was borne through the streets of Paris towards the Pantheon,
hundreds of white canes tapped along behind in what the Times, its own
fortunes
founded in literacy and publishing, called (with no apparent hint of irony)
a "strange, heroic procession." The Pantheon is in the Paris' fifth
arrondissement,
only a few blocks from the old school for the blind.

Despite the fact that the Braille dots still do not resemble print letters
(a complaint still heard today), Braille has been adapted to nearly every
language
on earth and remains the major medium of literacy for blind people
everywhere. Debunking the myth that Braille is somehow "too difficult" for
the sighted
to learn, sighted transcribers have long been a primary source of textbooks
for blind students. Thousands of these volunteers learned Braille as an
avocation
and churned out books one cell at a time from kitchen tables and bedroom
offices everywhere for many years with little fanfare. Their efforts in the
United
States have, if anything, expanded over the last decade with the coming of
the computer age and the mainstreaming of blind students in public schools.

Whether through software translators or direct entry, Braille turned out to
be extraordinarily well suited to computer-assisted production due to its
elegance
and efficiency. Braille displays for navigating and reading computer text in
real time have become increasingly affordable and reliable as well. The
computer
age created an unprecedented and continuing explosion in the amount of
Braille published and read in nearly every country throughout the world.

--Paula Kimbrough
Sample characters of present-day grade 2

Sources
Where We Come In |
The Braille Alphabet |
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