Six Little Dots: The Story of Louis Braille

Six Little Dots

1Louis Braille was born in 1809 in a small village in France. His father made saddles in a workshop near their home. When Louis was three years old, he was playing with his father's tools and hurt one of his eyes. An infection soon spread to his other eye. By the time Louis was five, he was completely blind.

2Louis was a bright and curious boy. He went to the village school and learned by listening carefully. When he was ten, he went to live and study at a special school for blind children in Paris. He hoped he would finally be able to read books on his own.

3At the school, Louis found a big problem. The school had only a few books that blind students could read. Their pages had large letters pressed into the paper so readers could feel them. The raised letters were hard to tell apart with a fingertip, so reading was very slow. Students also had no easy way to write their own words.

4When Louis was about twelve, an army captain named Charles Barbier visited the school. He shared a code called night writing, which used raised dots instead of letters so soldiers could read messages in the dark. Louis liked the idea of dots, but the code had problems. Each sound could need up to twelve dots, which was too many to feel under one fingertip at once. The code also had no way to show numbers or punctuation.

5Louis decided to build a better code. For about three years, he worked on it whenever he could, even late at night. By the time he was fifteen, he had finished. His code used only six dots, arranged in two columns of three. Each pattern of dots stood for one letter, and the whole pattern fit under a single fingertip. Louis also made patterns for numbers, punctuation, and even music.

6The new code was very different from the old raised letters. Readers could feel each pattern all at once instead of tracing the shape of a letter, so they could read much faster. Unlike the raised-letter books, braille could also be written by hand. Students pressed the dots into paper with a pointed tool and a special guide.

7Louis became a teacher at the same school, and his students loved his code. Even so, for many years the school did not make it the official way to read and write. Two years after Louis died, the school finally made his code its official system. Today, people around the world read braille in books and on signs, elevator buttons, and other everyday objects.