Lesson 5: Louis Braille
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 fin-
gers. 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 in-
vented 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 be-
come 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
-
year
-
old 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 knowl-
edge to all those who cannot see