It is believed that from the womb of suffering, hope and achievement are born. This is known to the blind who have learned to read and write thanks to the Braille method, as the inventor of this method of reading invented it after an injury that made him lose his sight when he was young.
Although his method was not widely admired at the time, it has taught hundreds of thousands to read and write over the past decades.
Louis Braille's ordeal
Louis Braille, who invented Braille to help the blind to read and write. He was not born blind, but lost his sight in an accident while working in his father's saddlery factory.
The French child, who was 3 years old at the time, was playing with his father's tools trying to make a hole in the leather of one of the saddles, but the needle flew into one of his eyes, which he was staring closely at.
A local doctor helped the child’s eye in his small town, 30 kilometers from Paris, and set an appointment for him with a larger surgeon in the French capital, but no one could save his eye, which was infected with inflammation that lost his sight in a few weeks, and then the other eye caught it when he was five It is believed that the wound infected him with sympathetic ophthalmia, which caused his blindness.
Despite the loss of sight, and the lack of options available to the blind at the time, the Braille family enrolled him in school in their village and he learned by listening, and he proved his superiority until, at the age of ten, he obtained a scholarship at the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, and it was the first school of its kind in France, where he created His method, which, by the way, he borrowed from a military system already in use by the French army.
military encryption
Braille inspired by Charles Barbier's military cipher. And the latter is the inventor of the night writing that was used by French army soldiers to read in the dark in the late 18th century, a method that used 12 squares in two columns (vertical and horizontal) of dots to record letters, where prominent points were added to these squares to distinguish letters, according to each letter.
The historical account is not the same here, but there is agreement among the accounts that Barbier's method, which aimed to help soldiers read messages without speaking or turning on lights, was complicated, and that Barbier visited the School for the Blind in 1821 where Braille was studying.
There were different accounts of whether Barbier’s goal in the visit was to develop his military tool or use it with groups that might benefit more from it, and whether Barbier met Braille personally, or that Braille heard about the military method from a friend’s reading of the local newspaper, but all accounts confirm that the idea of The military instrument inspired Braille to develop its own way of reading.
Braille, who was 15 at the time, first introduced his reading system to the public in 1824, and his system was easier than the previous military system, as it contained only 6 dots, lined up in two columns, and in which he assigned different sets of dots to different letters and punctuation marks, resulting in 63 total symbol.
A few years later, at the age of 19, Braille became a trainee teacher at the National Institute for Blind Youth, and then a teacher when he was 24, and he spent a large part of his life developing the system that remained in limited use during his life.
Braille saw limited success for his method during his life. In 1837 his school - where he later worked - published the first book in Braille, with the support of the school director, Alexandre François-René-Bigner, but after 3 years and with a new director of the school administration banning the use of this method, the controversy was Triggered in a limited setting throughout Braille's short life.
By 1850, tuberculosis forced Louis Braille to retire from teaching, and only two years later he died at the age of 43, and the Biography of celebrity website recorded his method, before his method gained fame and global acceptance now known.
Two years after his death, the school adopted his reading system for a second time, while the global spread was more slow, as the global adoption of Braille for English speakers was not until 1932, when representatives of blind schools in Britain and the United States met in London and agreed on a system known as Braille. Standard English Braille, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
Braille writing
The cell or letter in Braille is two opposite columns, each with 3 rows, and each letter in the language has several prominent points from those 6 points. This method produces 63 tokens in total.
In addition to the literary Braille code, there are other codes that use the Braille cell, but with other meanings assigned to each composition, there are musical notes, and these were started by the passionate Braille before his death, and there are also mathematical codes, and of course the way the codes are written varies according to the alphabet of each language.
As for the method of writing, it was done manually in the beginning, through a device called a slate, consisting of two metal plates linked to each other, papers inserted between them, and some plates contain a wooden base or a guide plate on which the paper is fixed, While the top has cell-sized windows, below each are 6 small pits, and a pen is used to press the paper to etch and shape the highlights.
A person who uses Braille writes from right to left in English, and when the paper is turned over, the dots go up and are read from left to right.
But with the widespread spread of the Braille method later on, printers and machines were invented to facilitate the process of printing books for the blind, as special machines were created with 6 keys, one for each point in the Braille cell.
The first Braille writing machine was invented by Frank H. Hall, the supervisor of the Illinois School for the Blind in the United States in 1892, and the model developed from this machine is still in use today.