A cell of six raised dots, two across and three down, giving 63 usable patterns
Small enough for one fingertip to read without moving, which was the crucial improvement
General knowledge · Words & language
Braille
Devised 1824; published 1829
Writing systems — tactile reading and writing
A tactile writing system of raised dots arranged in a cell two dots wide and three dots high, giving 63 possible patterns. It was devised in 1824 by Louis Braille, a fifteen-year-old pupil at the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris who had been blinded in childhood by an accident with his father's stitching awl, and published by him in 1829. It replaced Charles Barbier's clumsy twelve-dot "night writing" with a cell small enough to be taken in by a single fingertip, and has since been adapted to almost every written language, plus music and mathematics.
How to spot them
- ▸Raised dots in a cell two across and three down, read by fingertip
- ▸Invented by a blind teenager in Paris in the 1820s
- ▸A refinement of Charles Barbier's twelve-dot military 'night writing'
- ▸Written by hand with a slate and stylus, or typed on a Perkins Brailler
Key facts
Devised in 1824 by a fifteen-year-old pupil of the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris (1824)
Its inventor had been blinded by an accident with a stitching awl in his father's workshop
A fix for Charles Barbier's twelve-dot system, which coded sounds rather than letters
Barbier's symbols were too tall for a fingertip and had no numerals or punctuation
Written by hand with a slate and stylus, in mirror image, from the back of the page
Or typed on a mechanical writer with six keys plus a space bar
Its contracted 'grade 2' form shortens common words to save space
Uncontracted grade 1 spells every letter out
Its inventor's remains were moved to the Panthéon a century after his death, but his hands were left behind (1952)
Buried at Coupvray, his birthplace east of Paris
Extended to eight dots for computers, so that all 256 combinations encode ASCII
The extra dots sit at the bottom of the cell and are numbered 7 and 8
Quick-fire facts
- •Louis Braille was born at Coupvray on 4 January 1809 and died on 6 January 1852
- •He was blinded in one eye at the age of three by an awl in his father's harness-making shop; infection spread to the other eye
- •He devised the code in 1824, aged fifteen, and published it in 1829; a revision of 1837 added musical notation
- •Six dots give 2⁶ − 1 = 63 patterns, not counting the empty cell
- •The system improved on Charles Barbier's 'night writing', which used twelve dots to encode 36 sounds
- •Dots are numbered 1–3 down the left of the cell and 4–6 down the right
- •Grade 1 spells words out letter by letter; grade 2 uses contractions for common words and letter groups
- •The Perkins Brailler, a mechanical typewriter with six keys and a space bar, is the standard machine
- •Braille's remains were moved to the Panthéon in 1952, on the centenary of his death; his hands remain at Coupvray
- •World Braille Day is 4 January, his birthday; the asteroid 9969 Braille is named after him
Drill it — 8 cards
1 / 8new card
Sources
- Royal National Institute of Blind People — Louis Braille and the braille code Charity reference pages on the history and use of braille; cited without URL
- Jean Roblin — The Reading Fingers: Life of Louis Braille