A History of Braille
Braille
is our only business, and today, our computer-driven embossers produce millions
of pages of it in countries all over the world. But the history of Braille is
rooted deep in times long past... 1
Between Crusades The improbable chain of circumstance that would give birth
to Braille began during the Crusades with King Louis the Ninth of France.
Already a religious man, Louis returned to Paris after a crushing defeat in
the Crusades, 2 certain that God was making him suffer to teach him
humility. This belief intensified his interest in charity. Among other good
works, he founded the first institution for the blind in the world, the
"Quinze-Vingts" hospice (in English, "fifteen score" or 300).
The name was later claimed to refer to the first inhabitants, said to be 300
knights punitively blinded by the Saracens during the Crusades. This
dramatic tale of the hospice's origins is not true, but the horrifying
nature of the story has kept it alive for 500 years. Since the tale began in
a fund-raising letter for the Quinze-Vingts in 1483, it may mark another
first--institutional fund-raising as modern people would recognize it.
The Quinze-Vingts did provide a unique shelter and community for blind
Parisians. The largely self-governing hospice officially licensed its blind
inhabitants as beggars in uniform, apparently as a kind of accreditation
council in a world that feared being "cheated" by able-bodied frauds. The
inhabitants (who never reached 300 in number at any one time) led lives that
were somewhat more regulated but probably somewhat more secure than those of
many of their contemporaries. Residents kept some of the proceeds of
begging, but had to leave a portion of their property, upon their deaths, to
the hospice.3
Successful and beloved at home, King Louis the Ninth nonetheless could not
resist another attempt at a Crusade in 1270. Almost at once, he met his
death when a fever swept the French camp in Tunis. Because of his piety, the
Church canonized him in 1297 as "St. Louis." In an odd coincidence, he would
one day have a city named after him that would play an important role, 600
years later, in the acceptance of Braille in America.
One Day at the Fair St. Ovid's Fair was one of Paris's lively and popular
religious street festivals. 4 Beginning in 1665, the Fair ran from August 14
to September 15 each year and featured merchants, puppet shows, tightrope
walkers, jugglers, animal acts, and food vendors. By the 1770's, the fair
moved to the Place de la Concorde, near today's Hotel Le Crillon. 5 In 1771,
a young man named Valentin Haüy visited St. Ovid's Fair and stopped at a
sidewalk cafe for lunch. What he felt about what he saw there would begin to
change the world for blind people forever.
A group of blind men from the Quinze-Vingts were performing a slapstick
comedy act, pretending to be what many other blind people actually
were--musicians. They wore dunce caps, donkeys' ears, and huge cardboard
glasses. Seated before sheets of music turned upside down, they clowned for
the crowd by making squawking, discordant noises on old musical instruments.
The act was a hit, but Haüy was so sickened he could not finish his lunch.
He decided on the spot that blind people needed formal education to make
something better of their lives. 6 Valentin Haüy was exactly the right
person at the right time to have this inspiration. Born in 1745 in the small
village of Saint-Just-en-Chausèe, Valentin at age 6 relocated with his
family, who were weavers by trade, to Paris. He and his talented brother,
Renè-Just, who became a famed scientist and founded the field of
crystallography, flourished amidst the tremendous educational opportunities
in the city. Valentin became a skilled
linguist who spoke ten living languages in addition to ancient Greek and
Hebrew. While not personally wealthy, (he earned his living translating and
authenticating documents) he was well connected, in part due to his
brother's eminence in the new Royal Academy of Sciences.
Once Haüy
became interested in education for the blind, he turned himself
into an authority on the subject, visiting blind people from wealthy
families to learn what methods they used to cope with various tasks. His own
energy and flair for public relations would prove extraordinary, and so
would his luck. In the spring of 1784, while on another walk in Paris, he
found the perfect student.
As Haüy departed Saint Germain des Prés church after services, he pressed a
coin into the hand of a young blind boy begging near the entrance of the
church. When the boy instantly called out the denomination correctly, Haüy
had a startling insight: The blind could learn a great deal, perhaps even
reading, using the sense of touch.
The beggar, 12-year-old François Lesueur, became Haüy's first pupil.
François had been blind since infancy and had spent much of his short life
begging on the streets of Paris to support his family. Haüy made up
François' lost earnings from begging while he taught him to read by using
wooden letters he moved around to form words. François was a very quick
study; within six months he had learned to decipher even the faint
impressions on the back side of printed pages. Haüy brought him to the Royal
Academy, where his skills stunned France's top scholars and scientists.
The House on Rue Saint-Victor Haüy made the most of this triumph, soliciting
help from celebrities of the day, such as Maria Theresia von Paradis, a
young blind girl with an international reputation as a piano prodigy. Making
his own living in linguistics, Haüy was well-positioned to know of Louis
XVI's avocational interest in old manuscripts and secret codes and
successfully solicited the king's financial help. At first, he operated the
school from his home, but as the project grew, he was able to attract
sufficient royal support to lease a building.
With twenty-four pupils, Haüy opened the world's first school for the blind,
the Royal Institution for Blind Children, at 68 Rue Saint-Victor. The
school's first building was by then already over 500 years old and had
endured hard use as, among other things, an orphanage founded by St. Vincent
dePaul, the patron saint of charitable societies, and a house of ill repute.
The interior was dank, cramped, and in poor repair, with narrow stairwells,
tiny rooms and walls clammy to the touch.
Despite the dismal surroundings, the school, which accepted only students of
either noble birth or great intelligence, was an immediate success. Within
two years, the Academy of Music would sponsor benefit concerts for the
school while Haüy kept the royal funds flowing by taking the children to
Versailles to entertain the king at Christmas with demonstrations of
reading, arithmetic, and using tactile maps. Since the school had almost at
once established a print shop run by the students to make embossed books,
Haüy had them make up a run of specially bound "samples" for the nobles at
Court. The text was Haüy's own landmark book, An Essay On The Education Of
The Blind.7 One of these performances at court was attended by Marquis
d'Orvilliers, a nobleman from a small village east of Paris--Coupvray.
"Baby Braille" From the Country Some years later in Coupvray would be born
Louis Braille, the fourth child of a saddle maker. In 1812 at the age of 3,
Louis injured his eye in an accident while playing with his father's tools.
One local legend has it that the distraction that caused Louis' father to
leave his workbench unattended, with its dangerous attractions for a curious
toddler, was the news of Napoleon's army heading for what would become
eventual catastrophe in Russia.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the ministrations of the local healer, an
old woman who first treated Louis' damaged eye with lily water, followed by
those of an eye doctor in a nearby town, infection set in. Other ineffective
treatments followed, including a dose of calomel, a laxative. Over the next
year, the infection spread to the other eye, and Louis Braille lost all of
his vision.
To add to the troubles of the Braille family, Napoleon's constant war with
the rest of Europe caused their town to be overrun by armies--not only the
retreating French, but their enemies, the Prussians and the Russians. Over
the two years from 1814 to 1816, sixty-four different soldiers stayed in the
Brailles' modest three-room home. Their never-ending demand for food,
animals, and lodging caused severe hardship in the town. By 1816, war
deprivations had worn down the health of the citizens, and a smallpox
epidemic sprang up. People, including Louis Braille's father, did not trust
the government-promoted vaccinations, and many in the town fell ill.
Fortunately, at about the same time, other new people also came to
Coupvray--a priest, Abbé Jacques Palluy, and a schoolmaster, Antoiné
Bécheret. They came to know Louis well and came up with the then
revolutionary idea of allowing him to attend regular school. Both Louis'
parents could read and write, and his older brothers and sisters had all
attended the same school as children. Louis had long been enthralled by his
sister Catherine's stories remembered from her own schooldays. Louis did so
well in school that when the government decreed new local school methods
that would have prevented Louis from continuing his education, Bécheret and
Palluy approached the local nobleman for help in securing Louis' admission
to Valentin Haüy's school for the blind in Paris.
The nobleman was Marquis d'Orvilliers, a survivor of the recent smallpox
epidemic, who, having seen Valentin Haüy's students perform at Versailles,
agreed to write to the current director of the school, Sebastian Guillié,
and secure Louis' admission on a scholarship. In February, 1819, 10-year-old
Louis and his father made the four-hour stagecoach trip to Paris. Louis
became the youngest student at the school for the blind.
The school taught several practical trades--weaving, knitting, spinning,
shoemaking, basketry and rope making--as well as basic academic subjects.
While students had unprecedented learning opportunities, they were also
essentially unpaid employees--and hard-working, closely supervised ones at
that. They wore uniforms and lived spartan and regimented lives, with one
bath a month, scarce heat and poor food, mostly beans and porridge. The
school's drinking water was unfiltered and direct from the River Seine. A
dinner of dry bread (served in solitary confinement) was a standard
punishment.
Despite the hardships, Louis adjusted quickly to the school and made the
first of the many friends there he would keep all his life, fellow student
Gabriel Gauthier, one year older. He needed allies because the older
students often teased him about his country accent and called him "Baby
Braille" because of his youth.