Louis Braille's Original Books Were Burned
I learned about Louis Braille today. We all know that today, braille is the alphabet of the blind, but it turns out it's named after a 3 year old boy who changed the world.
It was actually Louis's world that changed at the age of 3, when he took one of his father's work tools and stuck it in his eye by accident. The injured eye became infected and that spread to the other eye as well. The vision in the intact eye started to diminish. Louis described it as a gray curtain that blocked his view of the world.
Eventually 3 year old Louis continued to ask, "When will it be morning?"
What a heart breaking question to be asked by a little child. 🙁
Morning would never come. Louis was permanently blind in both eyes.
In those days in the early 1800's, blind people were usually beggars and often wore rags and ate garbage if they couldn't get hand outs. They were considered stupid and incapable of learning by many people.
Louis Braille's father wanted more for his son, and Louis himself had a hunger, a hunger for learning, for knowledge, for doing, for growing. His father insisted on giving him jobs instead of coddling him and making him feel helpless. He had to fetch water. If he spilled it, he had to do it again. He polished leather and learned to tell by the feel when it was smooth enough.
He connected with a man of the church who took him on as a student. Louis loved learning and hungered for books and the ability to read.
Many at that time scoffed at the idea of a blind person going to school, but Louis and his father were both determined, and found a special school in Paris for blind children called Royal Institute for Blind Youth, and Louis went at age 10. Separation from his familiar surroundings of the town Coupvray and family was difficult.
The school library had a total of 14 books that had raised letters. The books were difficult and expensive to make, and difficult and slow for the blind children to read since the letters were easily confused with each other since many letters have similar shapes.
Louis got the idea from someone else who visited the school and shared a military code made of 12 dots, but created his own alphabet using raised dots in patterns to indicate letters. At age 12, Louis tried to produce a tactile literacy system for blind people, but it wasn't successful. When he was 15, he had come up with what is now used around the world.
You would think people would be happy to have something beneficial and new, but that was not the welcome Louis Braille's alphabet for the blind received.
The director of the institute, Pierre Armand Dufau, did not approve of Louis's new code and banned it while Louis was sick with then-life-threatening tuberculosis. He burned the painstakingly-produced Braille books. Braille was firmly banned, and implements and products were confiscated, at a school for blind children, probably because what was new and unfamiliar was seen first as a threat to the status quo. Any students caught using Braille were punished. But they secretly continued to use it, making the raised bumps in paper with knitting needles, forks, nails, and other objects.
Braille was not accepted by the leadership of the society to whom it had been gifted by a special young lad. They tried to destroy it. Braille fought the establishment and frequent ill health in the effort to bring the gift of the written word to blind people.
We already know Braille went on to succeed as the universal alphabet for people who can't see, but Louis didn't know it then.
People can accomplish pretty amazing things if they have a vision, and the pluck to pursue it in spite of naysayers and critics.
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