Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Thiruvananthapuram
Visakhapatnam
The benefactor of the blind
At a time when blindness was thought of as a curse and visually challenged persons were looked down upon as `fit for nothing' and forced to live on charity, he developed a new system of reading and writing for them and changed the way the world looked at them.
That was Louis Braille, whose code of reading and writing gave a new lease of life to generations of blind persons and continues to do so.
Born on January 4, 1809, at Coupvray in France, Louis was the son of a shoe-maker, Simon Braille. Louis used to sit in his father's shop and play with his tools. One day, when he was three years old, he was playing with an awl, a sharp tool used to punch holes in leather, it accidentally pierced one of his eyes. The injury caused infection and it eventually spread to the other eye, leaving him completely blind.
With the support of a local priest and a teacher, his parents enrolled him in a regular school where he learnt his lessons by listening and excelled in studies. At 10, he earned a scholarship to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris. The institute's method of reading was known as embossing. Large letters with raised outlines were printed so that the outlines could be traced with fingers. But the size of the letters made the embossed books large and expensive. Louis wanted a more practical way to read and started his search for a new reading method in 1821.
The same year a retired military man, Capt. Charles Barbier, introduced the Institute to an alphabetical code of dots and dashes, he had devised, for sending and receiving messages at night. Capt. Charles's idea was to allow soldiers to compose and read messages at night without illumination. The combinations were punched into paper and meant to be read with the fingers. Although the Institute dropped the code after only a few months, Louis kept experimenting with it. Eventually, he focussed on just the dots. He would spend nights and vacations at the Institute, punching dots into scraps of paper, searching for answers.
In 1824, Louis devised what has become the modern system of Braille. Its basis was the unit known as the Braille cell, with spaces for up to six dots - two across and three down - in each cell. By using different numbers of dots in different arrangements in each cell, he formed 63 dot combinations to represent letters, numerals, musical and scientific symbols. It was a practical code as the dots took up roughly the same space as print.
At 15, Louis had revolutionised touch-reading, opening the door to the possibility that all the world's literature some day could be read by blind people.
Not everyone endorsed the system. One headmaster at the Institute burnt all books in Braille. The introduction of Braille did not mean the end of embossing as the official method of touch-reading. The French Government, with embossing contracts to protect, snubbed it at first. Students embraced it, however, and the system became popular.
Louis, 43, was struggling for its acceptance till he died of tuberculosis in 1852. The code ultimately gained acceptance as the method of reading by touch, and Louis finally received the acclaim for opening up the world of literature to people who are blind.
To honour his contribution, his body was exhumed and re-buried in 1952 in the Panthéon in Paris, the resting place of the national heroes of France.
A bust of this benefactor of the blind has been installed at the Government Residential School for Visually Handicapped Girls at Yendada on the outskirts of the city.
B.M.G.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Thiruvananthapuram
Visakhapatnam
|
