History's Youngest Heroes: Louis Braille: Code Maker

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I first noticed that I was losing my vision when I was a teenager, and I've been losing it ever since, just by degrees.

Andrew Leland wrote a book.

called The Country of the Blind.

Around 20 years ago, when he was in high school, he started to lose his sight.

You know, every two years or so, when I go back to my retinal specialist, they say, yep, you've lost another chunk.

Now, Andrew is legally blind.

He sees 5% of what a fully sighted person would see.

He compares it to looking through a keyhole.

The eye disease that I have, which is called retinitis pigmentosa, is extremely gradual.

Sometime in the next, you know, however many years, five years, 10 years, you know, that 5% will go down to 1% or a fraction of a percent.

One almost takes for granted how much one uses one's vision.

And

when sight is lost,

you have to learn how to do things differently.

You have to confront the emotional part of that first.

There's this feeling of loss and of really of grief.

You have to sort of mourn the loss of vision because it is something that's so central to how you are oriented in the world.

And then you have to, the sort of second stage, I would say, is

more practical.

And that practical part of it can sort of defang the emotional part.

The practical part can push you out of the grieving process and into a sort of problem solver mode.

200 years before Andrew lost his sight, In 19th century France, another young man called Louis Braille went through something similar.

Faced with a world that limited his experience, he too would be motivated to solve problems.

His inventions would go on to change the lives of blind people across the world.

I'm Nicola Cochlin, and for BBC Radio 4, this is history's youngest heroes.

Rebellion, risk, and the radical power of youth.

Louis Braille, Codemaker

Louis Braille was born on the 4th of January 1809 in Couvre, a small town some 25 miles east of Paris.

His parents were Simone René and Monique Braille, who had three older children.

His father was a harness maker.

Newborn Louis was a small, sickly baby.

Concerned he might not survive, his parents swiftly registered him with the town authorities and had him baptized.

Yet Louis defied all odds and pulled through.

He grew up at the center of a close-knit family.

They weren't poor.

They had resources.

His father earned a good living as a harness maker, but they also had land.

Philippa Campsey is an independent researcher in the history of blindness, based in Toronto.

It was a very turbulent time in French history.

Napoleon was in power.

It was what's called the First Empire.

And there's pretty much constant war.

So there is disruption around him.

But I think Louis's probably a little bit cocooned by his family to allow him to grow up as much as possible as a child should grow up.

Braille's father's workshop was right next to where Louis Braille grew up.

And he would play there.

One day, when Louis was three years old, he was playing with one of his father's tools, which was a sharp implement used for puncturing leather.

and somehow, through an accident of his play, blinded himself with the tool.

According to a later account from a school friend, the sharp surpette, a slim knife, slipped at an angle and stabbed Louis in the eye.

An old woman from the village tended to his wound.

She used lily water, which was believed to have healing powers.

Unfortunately, This may have done even greater damage.

An inflammation developed in Louis's other eye.

The way that the eyes work is that often if one eye is injured in a particular way, there can be a kind of sympathetic damage in the other eye.

So, even though the other eye wasn't necessarily physically damaged with this tool, he lost all of his sight and so became blind.

Two years after the accident, aged five, Louis was completely blind.

His parents were devastated.

In 19th century France, life for blind people could be bleak.

In rural areas, some blind people might be taken on by wealthy patrons, who would give them work gardening or fruit picking.

In cities, they might become town criers, bell ringers, or water carriers.

Yet many had little choice but to turn to begging or sex work.

Some blind people preferred these occupations, which gave them a degree of freedom, rather than making them reliant on the whim of a patron.

As devout Catholics, Louis's parents heard biblical teaching that often frame blindness as a curse.

They know he's a very bright child.

He's always trying to do things that he's probably not ready to do and that's how the accident occurred in the first place.

Yet Louis' parents were determined that their son would be able to live a full life and have a proper education.

The local parish priest suggested,

Why don't you put him in school with the other kids, the sighted kids, and see how that works?

At school, Louis surprised his teachers by performing better than the sighted children.

Certainly that was a unique occasion.

Blind kids weren't generally accepted in regular schools.

He fitted in and because he was able to memorize things quickly, he remembered his numbers and he remembered things that he'd heard read out.

Louis was helped by one particular teacher who gave him special help.

When Louis was approaching the age of 10, though, the school was forced to change its teaching practice.

The future of his education fell into doubt.

Nearly 50 years earlier, in the summer of 1771, Paris hosted its annual Saint-Ovid Fair.

It's been set up in one of the large squares in central Paris.

Booths sold food and trinkets.

Entertainments included a billiards hall of circus animals.

The crowds filled the square.

Among them was a young interpreter from Picardy by the name of Valentin Oi.

Oi heard a commotion.

So he pushes his way through the crowd, and eventually he sees on a little stage a group of men dressed in silly costumes with dunces' caps.

There is a conductor who's raised above the level of the other performers, and he's got a dunce's cap that adds on donkeys ears

and he's waving a baton.

Oi, move closer.

They're trying to sing and they're pretending to play musical instruments, pretending to saw away to violin or pretending to play a flute, making a dreadful racket and everybody's laughing at them.

Oi wasn't sure what was supposed to be so funny.

Here are these these people,

they can't read music, they don't know how to play these instruments, and it takes him a while to realize.

Everyone in the orchestra was blind.

That was the joke.

The crowd around him may have found it hilarious, but Oi found the display humiliating and shocking.

He wrote about it later in life and said it was his first idea that we need to do better.

He founds the first school, the first school in the world, devoted to the education of blind children.

It was called the Royal Institution for Blind Youth, or in French, Institution Royale des Jeunes Avougles, this one school in the whole of France where they could educate blind people together.

It was this school in which, nearly 50 years later, Louis Braille enrolled.

On the 15th of February 1819, the 10-year-old Louis and his father took a stagecoach to Paris.

Louis was excited, yet anxious.

He'd been fortunate to secure a place in the school, but in order to attend, he would have to leave his family behind.

Louis and his father arrived at a five-story building on the Rue Saint-Victor.

Although the school had only recently moved there, The building itself was around 200 years old.

It was in a low-lying part of the city where there are some underground streams.

So it was damp and cold, and it was probably pretty horrible in winter.

One of the reasons they probably got it is because it was the site of a horrible massacre in the revolution, and probably nobody else wanted to touch it with a 10-foot pole.

90 students attended the school.

Two-thirds of them boys.

They were required to attend academic classes and workshops.

Students were supervised closely by staff.

At all times they had to display their role numbers which hung medallions around their necks.

Louis was number 70.

When Valentin Oi first set up the school he invented a system to help blind people read.

He developed a way of printing embossed text.

Visually, it looks just like a page of print, but to the blind student, they can run their fingers over the letters and read it.

No one had attempted to make the printed word accessible to blind people, yet Aoi's method was not a great success.

Text had to be printed with specialist equipment and could not be produced simply by hand.

The letters were developed for the eyes, and so even though you could technically discern their differences with the fingers, it's a system that is fundamentally visual still.

With only the power of touch, it was difficult to distinguish between some letters.

For instance, the capital letters C, G and O.

Despite its limitations, this system was the best they had.

So it was how history, geography, mathematics, and literature were taught to pupils at the institute.

Some of the students never actually mastered it in the end.

And even if they did, the only place where they could exercise this skill was at the school itself because they didn't own these books.

They couldn't take them home with them.

They were very rare.

They were very big.

So the students, if they did succeed in learning to read in this way, there's not much they could do with it afterwards.

Once they went home, that was the end of it.

Louis loved the vocational courses taught at the Institute.

These included weaving, knitting, and basket making.

They also made little slippers and later on Louis Braille is put in charge of that particular workshop making little padded slippers that would keep people's feet warm in the winter.

It was hoped that blind students would learn trades like these, so they might make a decent living.

The possibilities for academic learning were limited.

It was impossible to make notes on embossed books.

This effectively ruled out any academic work beyond the Institute itself.

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Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

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We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

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It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com

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There was a huge amount of frustration.

They're still dependent on sighted people to use their education to read them books or to help them write.

In 1820, when Louis was 12 years old, a man called Charles Barbier approaches the school, the director of the school, to suggest a way of writing.

During the French Revolution, he had fled to the United States.

There, he was fascinated by the language systems used by Native American nations.

He returned to France during Napoleon's time.

and began to develop methods for writing and code.

Barbier wondered whether this system could be of use to blind people.

Just pushing points into thick paper to make raised dots.

You just have to count dots.

The headmaster of the Royal Institute for Blind Youth allowed Barbier to test his method on the students.

It's a very rudimentary system.

It's a prototype.

It's clunky.

It doesn't apply to everything.

Even so.

It opened up extraordinary possibilities.

It was possible for students to raise dots and paper themselves without a special printing press.

This meant they could take notes, do homework, write notes to each other.

Thrilled to find a method of reading and writing they could use, many of the students took to Barbier's night writing system.

Yet Louis realized its shortcomings.

One being that 12 dots was far too many.

If you imagine the little fingers of these young students, not to mention anybody's fingers, to get all 12 dots, you're kind of using the less sensitive parts of your fingertip.

Louis had ideas for how to improve Barbie's system.

So Braille cut it in half.

His first innovation was to make a six-dot cell.

So with a six-dot cell, the fingertip, even a child's finger, is really able to pass over the whole Braille cell.

And another insight is that the dots, we could, in sort of digital terms, think of them as zeros and ones, or off and on.

So the pattern of the dots, they don't have to just all be there,

that the absence of a dot can be as meaningful to the finger as the presence of a dot.

For the next three years, Louis refined Barbier's system and created his own code.

Barbier, who wasn't blind, had created night writing with full vision.

Louis Braille created his system as a blind reader and writer himself.

The director of the Royal Institute for Blind Youth, François-René Pignet, wrote, Braille, who was detained by classes for part of the day, experimented with his method in the early morning, when there were no distractions, and sometimes during the night when he couldn't sleep.

He took paper, stylus, and slate, his work tools for the dormitory, and slept among them.

He takes them home with him in the holidays, and it's really sort of protracted process of working out how am I going to represent all the things I want to represent.

A blind writer wrote that the raised letter systems that Braille was using were like talking to the fingers in the language of the eye.

Those are visual letters that the fingers are trying to decode.

And with Braille, it was talking to the fingers in the language of the fingers.

And so there was just much more immediate access to the information that one was trying to reach.

I could imagine it feeling to those students like just like a like when your ears get plugged up from after you're swimming and then suddenly it comes out and everything is clearer.

It's like removing that layer of intermediary gunk because it was direct.

Louis was also a talented musician.

He played violin, the cello, and the organ.

The organ was the one that allowed him to earn a living as a church organist.

But it's very interesting that from a point at which

blind men who have never been trained to use a musical instrument are putting on a performance for laughs, Braille succeeds in becoming a professional musician who is able to perform for the public.

At the age of 16, Louis began to teach algebra, grammar, and mathematics to his fellow students at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth.

It's likely he was testing Braille with them.

Four years later, the school published a first edition of Braille's primary code, but the system was not yet complete.

He had an idea of combining dots and dashes.

It may work in Morse code, but it certainly didn't work for the blind.

While continuing to work as an apprentice teacher, Louis spent the next eight years refining his code.

He wanted to give blind people, in addition to himself, a way of of putting their thoughts on paper.

They'd never been able to do that before.

We take it for granted now.

Louis was a popular teacher at the school.

He continued to come up with extraordinary innovations.

He invented a 10-dot matrix system, which he called DecaPoint, which allowed the conventional alphabet to be printed in raised dots.

The system allowed blind people to write in a way sighted people could read.

and sighted people to write in a way blind people could read.

With the help of his friend, the mechanic Pierre-François Victor Foucault, Louis also invented the world's first dot matrix printer.

This was hand-operated, with pistons arranged like a fan.

An operator could effectively type in DecaPoint.

The printer was called a rapigraph.

Some of the letters Louis wrote on his rapigraph survive today.

They look surprisingly modern because similar dot matrix technology was used in the development of printing for sighted people many decades later, in the mid to late 20th century.

Yet these were hard years for Louis personally.

When he was 22, his beloved father died, and soon, he himself fell seriously ill.

Most people assume that this horrible old damp, cold

building that he's living in is part of what

starts to affect his health, and he's not the only one.

Congestion in the lungs,

weakness, loss of of energy.

Louis's illness was finally identified when he began to cough up blood.

He had tuberculosis.

Age 28, Louis published the second complete edition of his code.

This was the definitive book on which Modern Braille is based.

It took him years to figure out how to make it work.

for all the different uses to which it would be put.

And that was part of his genius is that he kept at it.

even with the setback of the first publication which wasn't quite ready he kept going and going and going the second edition developed the code far further louis presented the lord's prayer in braille in six languages in the first edition he had also devised a system for musical notation before that nobody had come up with any way

to write down a musical score in a way that a blind person could read.

They mostly had to learn by ear.

Braille for music was huge, given the fact that so many blind people earned their living through music.

Progress was not straightforward.

In 1840, Pierre-Armand Dufo took over as the director for the Royal Institute for Blind Youth.

Defoe believed that blind people should use the same reading and writing systems as sighted people.

He demanded a return to the earlier embossed print.

One of his first measures was to forbid the use of Braille, with the exception of musical notation.

The blind students were unconvinced.

By now, they understood the value of Braille.

The blind students still need Braille to write.

They have to.

There's nothing else for them.

One student wrote, We had to learn the alphabet in secret, and when we were caught using it, we were punished.

Defoe appointed a friend of his, Joseph Cadet, as deputy director.

Rather than supporting Defoe, though, Gadet saw how much the students valued Braille and advocated for its return.

In 1844, the institution held a ceremony to mark the opening of a new school building.

Gadet and the students set up a demonstration.

There are two students, one goes out of the room, another one takes dictation

of a text that they've never heard before.

They write it down.

The first student was brought back into the room.

And with a finger, traces the letters and reads them back.

First, a demonstration with a poem.

And then a demonstration with a piece of music.

The audience were profoundly impressed by this performance, which demonstrated the superiority of the band Braille code.

Among that audience was Louis Braille himself, along with his mother and brother.

Louis must have felt enormously

satisfied.

His mother and his brother must have been just bursting with pride.

Finally, his system is receiving official approval, is being praised in public to an audience.

If you look at the story of Braille's code being banned, it's about not treating the blind people as experts and thinking that we know better.

We've put all these resources into developing these raised line systems.

We've spent all this money on these huge printing presses and now you're trying to tell us that some kid has a better idea.

And I think you see examples of that again and again.

And the story of Braille

is just one of many examples of

people not

trusting blind people to know what's right for them.

And part of Braille's legacy and part of his genius was his courage to push for it and to know that he was the expert that had the right answer for blind people.

The Royal Institution for Blind Youth lifted its ban on Braille.

Instead, it embraced it.

The school goes on

to use

the system, but it's also starting to spread elsewhere.

Right from the beginning, Braille had had the idea that it could be used in other languages.

In 1854, Braille would become the standard method for reading and writing for blind people in France.

At an international meeting for deaf and blind people in Paris, Louis's code was officially named Braille.

Other European countries soon began to adopt their own versions.

Today, Braille is used in almost every country in the world.

Now, if you have an accessible digital file, which is not that hard to come by for most books, you can just point your computer or phone at that file.

and then connect a refreshable Braille display to the computer of the phone and then that book will appear in Braille instantly.

Louis Braille did not live to see his invention spread around the world.

After the ceremony at the Royal Institution for Blind Youth, his health deteriorated even further.

He died in Paris on the 6th of January, 1852, at the age of 43.

They hold a funeral for him in the chapel.

at the school, and his body is taken back to his hometown of Coufray to be buried.

Years later, French authorities decided that Louis Braille's body should be moved to the Pantheon, the mausoleum in Paris, dedicated to France's great and good.

Yet the townsfolk of Couvray were reluctant to see him go.

The village isn't too happy about losing his grave.

And the compromise that they come to, which is...

a trifle grotesque, is that they're going to take his hands off and leave them in coupre

in a special little stone box on top of the grave and they're going to take the rest of him and put it in the pantheon.

In June 1952, 100 years after Louis Braille's death, a procession of academics, politicians, and users of Braille followed his coffin as it was transferred to the pantheon.

It means he's recognized by the nation of France as being a national treasure.

Braille did open up the world of reading and writing to blind people in a way that nothing else did.

And it mattered that he persevered.

He succeeds beyond anybody's wildest dreams.

When I read now visually, I'm always listening to.

But Braille, I can read silently and hear that silent inner voice that you hear in your head when you read.

And that is incredibly powerful.

And I'm so grateful to Braille for restoring that, that kind of silent reading.

There's very little that's more valuable to me than that experience.

Next time, on history's youngest heroes.

In Narwich, a woman locks herself in a tiny cell for years.

Despite limited contact with the outside world, she becomes one of the first women to write in the English language.

A lot of people turn to her during COVID because here was a woman who'd chosen to be confined and she's kind of talked about it.

The visionary, Julian of Narwich.

I'm Gabriel Gatehouse and from BBC Radio 4, this is series 2 of The Coming Storm.

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As America prepares to elect its next president, we go through the looking glass into a world where nothing is as it seems, where the storming of the capital was a setup and the institutions of the state are a facade.

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Listen on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg Brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be qualified.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.