When was braille invented

Barbier's system was too complex for the military and was rejected. However, it was thought that it might be useful for the blind, which led Dr. Pignier to invite Barbier to come demonstrate it. Further, this large dot matrix made it so unless you had very large fingertips, you couldn't feel all the dots in a single matrix without moving your finger.

Still, Braille was inspired and, as a young teenager, he began experimenting. He took a piece of paper, a slate, and a stylus, punching holes and attempting to find something that worked.

In , Braille was just barely sixteen, but he thought he had hit upon something that was functional and superior to the existing embossed letter system. His original code consisted of six dots arranged in two parallel rows, each set of rows representing a letter.

This configuration was simpler than Barbier's system, but still versatile enough to allow for up to 64 variations, enough for all the letters of the alphabet and punctuation. Louis and his classmates would no longer have to learn through the slow process of tracing huge raised print letters and numbers. Louis continued to work on his education and became an accomplished musician, writer, researcher, inventor, and teacher at the same school he studied at, the National Institute for Blind Youth.

Louis Braille was later forced to retire from teaching due to tuberculosis and passed away on January 6, at the age of The Story of Louis Braille: Inventor of the Braille Code Louis Braille was a French Educator who invented a tactile system of reading and writing for the blind and visually impaired in He attended school in their village and learned by listening.

An attentive student, when he was 10 years old, he received a scholarship to attend the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. At the school, Louis learned both academic and vocational skills.

He also met Charles Barbier, who while serving In the French army, invented a code that used different combinations of 12 raised dots to represent different sounds. Barbier called the system sonography. Those who could not see would decode the dots by touching them. Its purpose had been for soldiers to communicate silently at night, but since it did not succeed as a military tool, Barbier thought the system might be useful for blind individuals.

It was quite complex soldiers had had difficulty learning it and it was based on sounds rather than letters. Braille spent three years—from ages 12 to 15—developing a much simpler system. This crucial improvement meant that a fingertip could encompass the entire cell unit with one impression and move rapidly from one cell to the next. Over time, braille gradually came to be accepted throughout the world as the fundamental form of written communication for blind individuals.

Today it remains basically as he invented it. However, there have been some small modifications to the braille system, particularly the addition of contractions representing groups of letters or whole words that appear frequently in a language. The use of contractions permits faster braille reading. It also helps reduce the size of braille books, making them much less cumbersome.

Today, we transcribe braille code in many different languages worldwide. Louis would be very proud to know his creation has given literacy to countless numbers of people over the decades.