The Code That Changed the World

When Louis Braille was very young, he would toddle into his father’s workshop. Simon-René Braille was a master saddle maker, and strips of leather filled the dusty room. Louis loved to watch his father cut and fasten the leather to make saddles for horses. He was especially captivated by the shiny tools on his father’s workbench.

One day when Louis was 3, his father stepped outside to chat with a customer. Louis picked up one of the sharp tools and tried to punch a hole in the leather like his father. But the tool slipped, piercing his right eye. Louis howled in pain. 

Both his eyes became dangerously inflamed. It was 1812 in France, and modern medicine was still a long way off. There was little that doctors could do as the boy’s world went dark. By the time Louis turned 5, he was blind.

Louis’s future seemed bleak. In the early 19th century, blind children were often abandoned to the streets, left to beg for food. But Louis would defy the odds. 

At his family’s urging, he got an education. And as a young teen, Louis invented braille, a system of reading and writing for the blind. 

Braille uses raised dots to represent letters and numbers that can be read by touch. Louis’s incredible creation opened up new opportunities for people who are blind or low vision.

The youngest of four children, Louis was born on January 4, 1809, in the village of Coupvray, France. He lived before modern conveniences like cars and electricity. But the bright boy would soon be ahead of his time. 

After Louis’s accident, his family encouraged him to be independent and resourceful. His father carved a wooden cane, and Louis began using it to tap his way around the house. With each tap, he learned how to feel what was in front of him so he could get around safely. Little by little, Louis ventured farther. First he navigated his family’s garden, then the stony paths around his town.

Simon-René dreamed that his son would one day read and write. He hammered nails into wood in the shapes of letters for Louis to trace with his fingers. 

As Louis got older, he started attending a nearby school. By listening to the lessons, he became one of the school’s best students. Still, he grew frustrated that he was unable to read or write like his peers.

Then in 1819, at age 10, Louis received a scholarship to attend the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, France. It was the world’s first school for blind students. 

“He was among the very privileged,” says Georgina Kleege. She’s an expert on disability studies who’s been blind since she was 11. “The idea that a blind person could be educated was really radical.” 

At school, Louis was surrounded for the first time by other students who were blind. He became passionate about music and learned to play the cello, piano, and organ by ear. Louis and his schoolmates took classes such as grammar and math, relying on memory to learn the material. 

Students at the school read by tracing embossed, or raised, letters with their fingers. But reading this way was slow and difficult, with just a sentence or two fitting on a page. And because embossed books were expensive to print, the school’s library had only 14. They were too big to be carried around, and pressing on the pages to read them wore out the letters over time.

“There are accounts of blind readers from very early on who would read until their fingers bled,” says Sari Alschulter, a professor at Northeastern University who focuses on disability studies. “You had to press so hard on the pages.”

And writing was out of the question for many of the students. It required memorizing the shapes of the embossed letters and re-creating them on paper with ink. Students who managed to get that far couldn’t even read back what they’d written.

Louis knew there had to be a better way. When Louis was 12, Charles Barbier, a French army veteran, visited the school. Barbier had developed a new system of reading and writing. It used raised dots, arranged in groups of 12, to represent letters or sounds. Known as “night writing,” the system allowed soldiers to read army orders like “advance” or “withdraw” in the dark.

While night writing was a big improvement over embossed letters, there were drawbacks. The system involved many dot combinations, making it hard to learn. The combinations were too large to feel with one touch. And there was no spelling, punctuation, or numbers.

But Louis was inspired. He began punching holes into paper with one goal in mind: to refine Barbier’s system into a code that would be easier to use. 

Louis placed a sheet of heavy paper onto a board called a slate. Then he used a pointed tool known as a stylus to punch dots into the paper. When Louis flipped the paper over, he could feel the raised dots.

He spent nearly three years turning those dots into a system of reading and writing. He based it on groups of six dots—two across and three down (see “How Braille Works,” above). He created a specific pattern for each letter of the alphabet. 

By 1824, at age 15, Louis had invented the earliest version of braille. He would go on to add patterns for capital letters, numbers, and punctuation. 

What made braille especially groundbreaking, Kleege says, is that it gave blind people a way to write. For the first time, they wouldn’t need anyone’s help to record their ideas.

“The writing part was huge,” she explains. “Braille allowed blind people to write for themselves and to be able to read what they’ve written.” 

Despite its revolutionary potential, braille didn’t take off overnight. Some people worried that teaching blind and low-vision children their own code might further isolate them from the world.

Still, Louis kept inventing. He devised a code for math, and he created music symbols so blind musicians could read and compose music. And in 1829, he published a book introducing braille to the world: Procedure for Writing Words, Music, and Plainsong by Means of Dots. 

In 1833, Louis became a teacher at his school. He would instruct blind youth there for nearly two decades. 

He also helped to create a new dot system called raphigraphy (rah-FIH-gruh-fee). In it, raised dots formed the shapes of traditional letters. The goal was to bridge the gap so blind and sighted people could write to each other. 

But raphigraphy took a long time to produce by hand. By the early 1840s, Louis found a way to make the process faster. He worked with a friend, Pierre Foucault, who was also blind, to build a machine called a raphigraph (see photo, above). It could produce raised-dot letters.

Though his mind remained active, Louis was often sick with lung-related illnesses. He died at the age of 43 in Paris in 1852, two years before France adopted braille as its official reading and writing system for blind people. The United States adopted a uniform braille system in 1932.

Today, 200 years after its creation, braille is considered one of the world’s greatest inventions. The raised-dot system is everywhere—in museums and offices and on elevator buttons, ATMs, and more. Braille codes are used in more than 133 languages around the globe.

Even now, the system continues to change lives. Studies show that blind people who use braille are more likely to be employed. 

In France, Louis’s childhood home is now a museum. There, a plaque highlights Louis’s historic accomplishment: “He opened the doors of knowledge to all those who cannot see.”