Louis Brallie Biography

       “Life is easy with eyes closed”

                          Jhon Lennon

Louise Braille the man who never needed to see, the man who never needed to open his eyes to find success and the man who believed that life and success are much easier with eyes closed.  He was the inventor of BRAILLE the system of reading and writing used by the people who are blind. At the age of five, he became blind and started a new journey towards the road to success without taking a look on the journey towards it.

He was born on 4^th January 1809 at Couprvay France, a town 20 miles east of Paris. He used to live there along with his father, mother and three elder siblings. His father was leatherette and a maker of horse tack. As soon as he started to move on his own feet, he used to play in his fathers workshop. One day when the child was toying with some of his father’s tools and trying to make a hole in the leather. He pressed down hard to drive the point in, suddenly the tool glanced across the tough leather and stuck him in his eye. As soon as this incident came into his parent’s knowledge they took Braille to the nearby doctor who disclosed that the child’s eye is severely damaged and infected. Plus he also arranged a meeting in Paris with a highly respected surgeon but no treatment was strong enough to save the damaged eye. The child suffered immense pain for several weeks as the eye became severely infected by an infection which then travelled to the second eye. After years of treatment, Braille luckily survived the suffering of infection. By that time he became completely blind by both eyes. His parents then struggled hard to raise their youngest child as a normal child and didn’t let him feel the fact that he was blind. At the age of 10, he departed from his house as the family’s last child to leave household in 1819.

He then went to ‘Royal Institute for Blind’ in Paris for his studies. There he was made to read by a system known as ‘The Hauy System’ introduced by the schools founder in which a small library for the children was manufactured using a technique of embossing heavy paper with raised imprints of Latin but Braille found this remedy of learning quite frustrating as all the Hauy Books came in uncomfortable shapes and sizes, exquisitely delicate and very expensive to buy. Some how Braille managed to read all the books.

 Braille wanted to make his own machine or system through which it would be much easier for the blind to read and write. In 1821 Charles Barbier, a Captian of French Army visited the school and shared his invention called ‘The Night Writing’, which was a code of 12 raised dots of numbers and dashes. This invention was mostly used at times of war which let the soldiers know the plan in coded words, so that the plan could be kept as a secret from the enemies. Braille got inspired with this invention and this forced him to make his own simplified version.  This is how Louis Braille wrote his name with that system for the first time.                                    

Louis Braille worked tirelessly all day and night on his ideas and successfully completed his invention in 1824. In his invention he made a pattern on dots for each letter. These dots were capable of being recognized as letters with a single touch of a finger. He created this system by using an ‘Awl’, the same kind of implement which had blinded him.This simple method made it easy to write as well as read. He also adapted it to produce a version of the notation used in music and mathematics. He named this system "BRAILLE". Braille along with his friend Pierre Foucault went on to develop a typewriter which would make it even easier to produce text in Braille.                     

Braille had always been an unwell child and his condition worsened in adulthood. A persistent respiratory illness which is nowadays called Tuberculosis infected him due to which his condition reached mortal danger. He was taken back to his home in Coupvray where he died in 1852 at the age of 43.

In 1854 Braille’s System was finally adopted by the ‘Royal Institute For  Blind’ which is now known as ‘Royal National College For The Blinds’ . It also spread throughout the French speaking world but some how was quite slower in other parts of the world. New variations in Braille Technology continue to grow, including such innovations as Braille Computer Terminals, Robo Braille email delivery service, and Nemeth Braille.