Louis Braille born - January 4, 1809

On this day in 1809, French educator Louis Braille, namesake of the Braille reading and writing system, was born. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, I'm Eves and you're listening to This
Day in History Class, a podcast that proves history is
always happening. Today is January four. The day was January four,

(00:27):
eight o nine French educator Louis Brill, namesake of the
Brill Reading and Writing system, was born. Roll was born
in Couvray, France, a village near Paris. He was the
youngest of four siblings, born to Simon Renee Brill and
Monique Baron. When he was three years old, he injured
his eye with a sharp tool while playing in his

(00:48):
father's workshop. His eye soon became infected and the infection
spread to his other eye and what's believed to have
been a case of sympathetic a thomia. Sympathetic thomia occurs
when the uveal tract and an uninjured eye becomes inflamed
after trauma, are surgery, and the other eye. By the
time he was five, he was completely blind. As a child,

(01:11):
Braille was taught to read by feeling studs hammered into
wood in the shape of letters. His parents sent him
to the Royal Institute for a Blind Youth in Paris
when he was ten years old. Their students were taught
to read books that used embossed print letters, and to write.
Students had to memorize the shape of letters and tried
to recreate them on paper. This, of course, was a

(01:34):
difficult task. Conditions at the school were subpar, but the
environment and curriculum had their benefits for the students there.
Braille was considered a smart and creative student, and he
became a good cello player and organist. Around the same time,
Charlotte Barbier, a retired artillery officer in Napoleon's army, created

(01:54):
a system of writing using a raised dot alphabet. Barbia
attempted to sell the system, called night writing to the
French army, so that soldiers could pass notes in the
dark without striking a light. When the army proved uninterested
in the idea, Barbie turned his attention to the Royal
Institute for Blind Youth. Rail saw Barbia's demonstration and was

(02:16):
intrigued by night writing, but he thought that it needed
many improvements. By eighty four, Braile had devised his own
improved system. It was simpler than barbier system, and it
was better adapted for blind people. As Barbier was cited.
Rail's method used a six dot sil rather than a
twelve dot system. In it, six dots were arranged in

(02:39):
different patterns or sales that formed letters, numbers, and later
musical notes. Other students at the Royal Institute picked up
the system, but the school did not endorse it. Rail
became a teacher at the Institute and in eighteen twenty
nine he published the book Procedure for Writing Words, Music
and Plain, Song and Dots. But it took a while

(03:00):
for the Braill system to catch on. That was partly
because Valentine a, a cited man who found at the
Royal Institute, worked on a principle that blind people should
not have a different alphabet than cited people, and Pierre
Armand dufat the director of the Institute beginning in eighteen forty,
restricted use of the Brail system in the school and

(03:21):
had books and braille writing equipment burned. Dufout eventually changed
his tune, but the Brail system was not officially adopted
in France until eighteen fifty four, two years after Braill died.
But during his lifetime Braill worked on improving his reading
and writing system. In eighteen thirty seven, he published a

(03:42):
revised edition of the system. In this edition, the raised
dash was eliminated, leaving just raised dots. Despite the system
not being widely accepted, students learned Brail on their own,
and Brail himself continued to teach history, geometry, and algebra
at the school. As the Brail system spread throughout Europe,

(04:04):
it met resistance from people who thought blind people didn't
need to know how to read, from people who thought
it was unnecessary because sited people could not read it,
and from those who have posted it for other reasons.
But since then, the Rail system has been modified by
Brail's successors and recognized as a universal language. I'm Eve

(04:25):
Jeff Cote and hopefully you know a little more about
history today than you did it yesterday. If you'd like
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(04:47):
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