Louis Braille was born near Paris, France, in 1809. When he was a little boy, Louis loved to play with his father's tools. One day, when he was four, he was playing with his father's tools when a sharp tool went into his left eye. An infection started in his left eye and went to the other eye. He was unlucky. A few weeks later, Louis was blind. When Louis was ten, his parents took him to a school for blind children in Paris. Louis lived at the school. He was a good student and looked forward to the day when he could read. These books had letters that stood out. He had to feel each letter with his fingers. There was one sentence on each page. Just one part of a book weighed 20 pounds. A whole book weighed 400 pounds! By age eleven, Louis had read all fourteen books in the school. He wanted to read more, but there were no more books. So every evening, he tried to find a way for blind people to be able to read books. One day, Captain Charles Barbier, a French soldier, came to speak at the school. Barbier had invented night-writing. This system used dots for the letters of the alphabet. Soldiers could feel the dots with their fingers and read with no light. Barbier thought night-writing could help blind people. Barbier's system was difficult, but it gave Louis an idea. He worked night after night to make a simple system with dots. By age fifteen, he had finished his system. He showed it to other students in the school, and they loved it. They called it Braille, after him. At age seventeen, Louis graduated from the school and become a teacher there. In his free time, he copied books into Braille. Someone read to Louis while he made the dots. He copied the books of Shakespeare and other writers into Braille. The students read all the books and wanted more. The school did not want a fifteen-yearold boy's invention to be better than their own heavy books and would not let students read Braille books. Nevertheless, the students continued to read them. Finally, after twenty years, the school agreed to use Braille. Louis Braille spent the rest of his life trying to tell the world about Braille. But nobody cared. Louis was unlucky again. He became very sick. Even when he was sick in his bed, he continued to write books in Braille for students at his school. A few years later, Louis Braille died at age forty-three. Two years after he died, schools for the blind began to use his system. Today, we use Braille not only to write words in all languages, but also to write math and music. Blind people send Braille greeting cards, wear Braille watches, type on keyboards, and take elevators with Braille controls. Louis Braille had no idea how many people he had helped. On the door of the house where he was born are words "He opened the doors of knowledge to all those who cannot see.