Braille was
10 years old when he was sent to a special boarding school for the blind. He
was both intelligent and creative and wasn't going to let his disability slow
him down. The books for the blinds had large letters that were raised up off
the page. Since the letters were so big, the books themselves were large and
bulky. It took him a long time to read a sentence. By the time he reached the
end of a sentence, he almost forgot what the beginning of the sentence was
about. Louis knew there must be a better way.
By the time
Louis Braille was 12, something important happened. A soldier visited the
school and showed children the military code called "night writing"
which was used by soldiers to communicate after dark. It was based on dots
system. Each dot or combination of dots stood for a letter or a phonetic sound.
This was a very complicated system, but it inspired Louis Braille to develop a
six-dot system for the blind.
On his next
vacation home, he sat in his father's leather shop and picked up one of his
father's blunt awls. The idea came to him in a flash. Louis used the blunt awl
to punch out a sentence using dots. He read it quickly from left to right.
Everything made sense. It worked.
He worked on
this system of six raised dots in different combinations, each combination
corresponding to a letter of the alphabet. Because there were fewer dots, they
could be "read" with one finger-tip. Soon the benefits of the new
system were realized. Today, Braille is used in almost every country in the
world.
It is not an
exaggeration to say that Braille is one of the most important innovations in history.
True it does not affect the majority of people; it is a vital link to the
outside world.
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