When was braille introduced

As a result of the light shining from the lamps, enemy combatants knew where the French soldiers were and inevitably led to the loss of many men. Each dot or combination of dots within the cell represented a letter or a phonetic sound. The problem with the military code was that the human fingertip could not feel all the dots with one touch.

Louis Braille was born in the village of Coupvray, France on January 4, One year earlier he was enrolled at the National Institute of the Blind in Paris. He spent the better part of the next nine years developing and refining the system of raised dots that has come to be known by his name, Braille.

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. Braille's story starts when he was three years old. He was playing in his father's shop in Coupvray, France, and somehow managed to injure his eye. Though he was offered the best medical attention available at the time, it wasn't enough—an infection soon developed and spread to his other eye, rendering him blind in both eyes.

While a tragedy for him, had this accident not happened, we wouldn't have braille today. There was a system of reading in place for the blind at the time, which consisted of tracing a finger along raised letters.

However, this system meant that reading was painfully slow and it was difficult to discerning by touch the relatively complex letters of the alphabet. As a result, many people struggled to master the embossed letter system. In , Braille's teacher, Dr. Barbier had developed a "night writing" system for the military using raised dots after Napoleon requested a system of communication that soldiers could use even in darkness without making any sound in the process.

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. He was a determined student and at the age of 10 received a scholarship to attend the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, France.

While there, students were visited by French Army Officer Charles Barbier who introduced the students to a dot cryptography system he created for soldiers to use for night-time battlefield communication. His system was comprised of different combinations of 12 raised dots to represent different symbols.

Louis Braille thought that the tactile coding system was a great idea and could be the basis for a form of reading and writing that might be useful for the blind.

His system only had six dots three dots lined up vertically next to each other and he assigned different combinations of dots to different letters and punctuation marks. From then on, Louis spent every waking moment outside of class poking holes in paper, ironically, with an awl like the one that accidentally blinded him.