Braille History

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.