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The First
Books for Blind Readers Director Guillié, running the school at
the time of Louis' admission, was an ophthalmologist by vocation who had
founded the first eye clinic in Paris and survived the many changes of
government during the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic era.
In the twenty years encompassing the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars,
nearly a million Frenchmen had died, half of them under twenty-eight years
of age. During the worst times of the Revolution, the school building itself
was used to jail uncooperative priests (including Valentin Haüy's own
brother) who refused to swear allegiance to the new government, and 170 of
them were murdered there in 1792.
The nobles who had once helped the school in the past were themselves
killed, jailed or in flight from France. The school was absorbed by
Guillié's eye clinic and for a time was also combined with the school for
the deaf, another ground-breaking Parisian facility that predated even
Haüy's first efforts towards education for the blind. The blind students
ultimately were forced into the Quinze-Vingts, now overcrowded, chaotic, and
largely the home of last resort for elderly blind beggars.
Guillié's interest in reestablishing the school for the blind was not
entirely humanitarian, for when he got the building back and reopened, he
reclaimed only the most promising students from the Quinze-Vingts. With few
teachers, Guillié relied heavily on older students acting as tutors or
"repeaters" to give lessons verbally to younger students. Although the
"repeaters" did not know it, Guillié had some success in reestablishing
government support for the school and received a small stipend for the older
students' teaching time, which he personally pocketed. He instituted harsh
schedules and discipline to drive up the students' productivity, even as
rain occasionally poured through the building's leaking roofs into the
workshops and classrooms.
Goods the students produced were sold all over Paris and produced a vital
stream of revenue, thus creating the first sheltered workshop. For example,
among their other skills, the students wove the fabric for their own
uniforms, which were, depending on the account, either blue or black.
Guillié obtained a contract for the school to weave sheets for Paris' huge
system of public hospitals. The largest of these hospitals, La Salpêtrière,
had a capacity of more than 10,000 inmates. 8 The few wealthy potential
patrons who remained were often taken on tours through the school and
workshop, with the students' reading of the few embossed books a highlight
of the trip. Haüy's original method of embossing books had continued
unchanged for three decades. By applying soaked paper to raised letter
forms, the tactile shape of the letters remained after the paper dried.
Pages were then glued back-to-front to produce a two-sided sheet. These
books were, of course, extraordinarily slow and
difficult to make--and almost as slow and difficult to read, since the shape
of each large, ornate letter had to be traced individually. At the time of
Louis Braille's admission, the school, now over thirty years old, had one
hundred pupils and a total of fourteen embossed books.
In 1821, Dr. Guillié was fired after being caught in "an intimate
relationship" with a female teacher when she became pregnant. The school's
new director, André Pignier, immediately resolved to improve conditions,
first instituting two outings a week so students could breath fresh air and
get some exercise away from their desks and workbenches. Students began to
travel through the city, all gripping one long rope as a guide, to attend
mass on Sunday at St. Nicholas du Chardonnet church and to go on a Thursday
afternoon excursion to a local botanical park.
Another Pignier reform was to stage a public celebration of the school's
history, at which the guest of honor would be founder Valentin Haüy. Haüy,
now an old man, had not been inside the school in years. Losing control of
the school in the aftermath of the revolution, he had been forced to flee
France. Before his departure, he rescued one of his most promising students,
Rémi Fournier, from the chaos at the Quinze Vingts. Together they spent over
a decade in virtual exile working with blind students in other European
countries, including Russia. Schools for the blind were an idea who time had
definitely come, with Liverpool (1791), Vienna (1804), Berlin and St.
Petersburg (1806), Amsterdam (1808), Dresden (1809), Zurich (1810), and
Copenhagen (1811) appearing in rapid succession using many of Haüy's ideas
and methods. Upon his return to France, Haüy, exhausted, destitute, and
himself nearly blind, had found himself still banned from the school by the
unsympathetic Dr. Guillié.
On the day of the ceremony to honor Haüy, Louis Braille, now 12, along with
several other students, gave a musical program of songs from the school's
early days and a reading demonstration using the original embossed books for
Haüy, now 76. Later in the day, the two met face to face, one year before
Haüy's death. Louis Braille would remember the occasion for the rest of his
life. The following year, he was one of a small group from the school to
attend Haüy's meager funeral.
Too Tough
for the Artillery? Another visitor a short time later would have
an equally large influence on Louis Braille's future. Charles Barbier de la
Serre was another quick-witted survivor of the political turmoil that
engulfed France. Barbier was born in Valenciennes in 1767, his father the
controller of the farms of the king. Charles thus secured admission to a
royal military academy in 1782, probably in Brienne, which if true would
have made him one of Napoleon Bonaparte's schoolmates. Barbier fled the
Revolution by spending some time in the United States as a land-surveyor in
Indian territory and returned to France by 1808, where he joined Napoleon's
army and published a table for quick writing or "expediography," followed a
year later by a book describing how to write several copies of a message at
once.
Barbier's interest in fast, secret writing was grounded in harsh experience.
The French army under Napoleon had been defeated for the last time at
Waterloo in 1815, but before that, they had nearly conquered Europe and were
considered even by their enemies to be the best artillerymen in the world.
In his own war experiences, Barbier had seen all the troops in a forward gun
post annihilated when they betrayed their position by lighting a single lamp
to read a message. A tactile system for sending and receiving messages could
be useful not only at night, but in maintaining communications during combat
with its unique terrors for artillery crews. Dense, blinding smoke and
thunderous noise combined to create hellish confusion. Should the battle go
badly for the horses that transported the huge guns, the surviving artillery
crew would find itself immobilized in a tangle of guns, harnesses and dead
or dying animals with no means of escape as the bullets flew.9 Barbier and
the
students of the Institution for Blind Children probably first encountered
each other when both were exhibiting their communication methods at the
Museum of Science and Industry, then located in the Louvre. Barbier had a
device that enabled the writer to create messages in the dark; the students
were reading, with the usual painful slowness, Haüy's books of embossed
print letters.
Barbier decided to take his own dot- and dash-based artillery code, called
sonography, to the Royal Institution for Blind Children and contacted Dr.
Guillié, then still the director. Guillié, who would be fired eight days
later, was unenthusiastic about sonography and its possible use for the
blind. He sent Barbier away with little encouragement.
Fortunately, Barbier was persistent. He returned to the school in the wake
of the sex scandal and interested Dr. Pignier, the new director, in his
system. Dr. Pignier arranged a demonstration and passed around a few
embossed pages of dots to the students.
Louis Braille was thunderstruck when he first touched the dots of the
sonography samples. He had often played around with tactile writing at home
on summer vacation in Coupvray. Neighbors later recalled that as a child
Louis had tried leather in various shapes and even arranged upholstery pins
in patterns, hoping to find a workable tactile communication method, but
with no success. Once he touched the dots, he knew he had found his medium
and quickly learned to use Barbier's "ruler," which greatly resembles
today's slate. He, his friend Gabriel, and other boys at the school taught
each other the code by writing each other messages back and forth. Only one
week later, Dr. Pignier wrote Barbier that sonography would be used at the
school as a supplementary writing method.
Louis was also quick to see the problems with Barbier's system, which was
never actually used by the army because of its complexity. Sonography used a
12-dot cell, which is not only more than a fingertip can cover, but
laborious to write with a stylus. There were no punctuation marks, numbers
or musical signs, and there were lots of abbreviations, because the cells
stood for sounds instead of letters. When Louis met with Captain Barbier to
talk about his ideas to improve the code, the Captain, by now in his mid
fifties, was probably at first incredulous and then annoyed at having his
ideas questioned by someone so young, inexperienced, and blind as well.
Instead of arguing with the imperious Captain, Louis stopped asking his
advice altogether and instead went to work experimenting with the code on
his own. He had little spare time; he won prizes that semester in geography,
history, mathematics, and piano while also working as the foreman of the
slipper shop at the school. Still, late at night and at home in Coupvray
during the summer, Louis tried various modifications that would enable the
unique letter symbols to fit under one fingertip.
In October, 1824, Louis, now 15, unveiled his new alphabet right after the
start of school. He had found sixty-three ways to use a six-dot cell (though
some dashes were still included). His new alphabet was received
enthusiastically by the other students and by Dr. Pignier, who ordered the
special slates Louis had designed from Captain Barbier's original one.
Gabriel Gauthier, still Louis' best friend, was probably the very person
ever to read Braille.
The obvious usefulness and popularity of Louis' invention did not make his
own life much easier. Bad times in France in 1825 caused the school's
rations of fuel to be further reduced and the already-spare diet was reduced
to bread and soup. The teachers--all sighted--resented the new code, with
its implied demand that they learn something so alien. Worried for their own
jobs, they complained that the sound of punching was disrupting classes. The
school had finally achieved some financial stability with a government
stipend from the Ministry of the Interior, but in 1826, the school
bookkeeper fled after embezzling an amount equal to one-half the annual
budget.
Dr.
Pignier appealed to the government repeatedly over the next several
years for official recognition of the new alphabet as well for repair or
replacement of the deteriorating building. His requests were denied, but the
director continued his support for the boys' use of the new code, moved by
their proficiency and enthusiasm. He promised Louis he would continue to
petition the government and in the meantime arranged for Louis to become the
first blind organ student at St. Anne's Church.
The school for the blind had produced many organists; by Louis' time, over
fifty graduates were playing in churches around Paris. Louis proved an
exceptionally talented musician, was heard (and praised) by Felix
Mendelssohn, and a few years later obtained the first of several jobs as a
church organist.
First Books in Braille Dr. Pignier created still another opportunity for
Louis. At 17, he appointed Louis the first blind apprentice teacher at the
school. The other teachers were incensed but Pignier insisted that Louis'
"conscientiousness, scholarship and patience" fitted him perfectly for the
job. He taught algebra, grammar, music, and geography. Despite his busy
schedule, he kept tinkering with the code. By 1828, he had found a way to
copy music in his new code (and eliminated the dashes).
In 1829, at age 20, he published Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain
Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them, his
first complete book about his new system. A few years later, he, Gabriel
Gauthier and another blind friend and former pupil, Hippolyte Coltat, would
become the first blind full professors at the school. This meant they could
leave the school occasionally without asking someone's permission, got their
own rooms, and had gold braid added to their school uniforms as a mark of
rank. All three new teachers used the new alphabet in all their classes.
The same year, Louis Braille was drafted and was represented at the
recruiting board by his father. A census record of this encounter survived
and shows that Louis was exempt from the French army because he was blind,
as a result of which he "could not read or write," an ironic footnote for
someone who had largely solved one of the great problems of literacy before
he was out of his teens.
Spending so much of his life in the damp, dirty, and cold school building
and living on a poor diet probably caused Louis to develop tuberculosis in
his mid- twenties. The diagnosis would not have surprised him. For years, his
fellow students had become ill in such numbers that a visitor complained
that the students could barely stand for long in a straight line for all the
coughing and wheezing. Student funerals were a sadly frequent occurrence.
For the rest of his life, Louis would have periods of health and energy
interspersed with terrifying hemorrhages and near-fatal collapses. Still,
despite his illness, teaching load, and several jobs playing the organ, he
worked on at refining the code. Although French does not use a "W," Louis
added it later at the request of an English student, the blind son of Sir
George Hayter, painter and portraitist to the British royal family. He
worked hard on a Braille music code as well, probably spurred not only by
his own musical abilities, but by those of his friends as well. Gabriel
Gauthier, who would also become ill with tuberculosis, was a composer as
well as an organist, who would eventually produce his own work among the
first volumes of Braille music.
First "Braille-Print" System Louis was a very popular teacher, generous with
both time and money in helping his students. He made many personal gifts and
loans from his small salary to help them buy warm clothes and better food.
(He also saved enough to buy himself a piano so he could practice whenever
he wished). Because students typically had no way of writing home to their
families without dictating a letter to a sighted teacher, Louis invented
raphigraphy, which represents the alphabet with large print letters composed
of Braille dots. Raphigraphy was a labor-intensive system for making an
embossed print letter--the letter "I" alone required the Braillist to punch
16 dots by hand.
A blind inventor, François-Pierre Foucault, had been a student at the school
back in the Quinze-Vingts days after the Revolution. He returned in 1841 and
when he saw what Louis Braille was doing, invented a machine called a
"piston board," to punch complete dot-drawn letters with a press of a single
key.
Ironically, the first working print typewriter had been built in 1808 in
Italy to help a blind countess, Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzono, produce
legible writing for sighted people, but print typewriters were not produced
on any scale until the 1870's. In the meantime, the piston board (although
expensive) itself became a common device throughout Europe.10
In 1834, Dr. Pignier arranged for Louis to demonstrate his code at the Paris
Exposition of Industry, attended by visitors from all over the world. King
Louis Phillippe of France presided over the opening of the show and even
spoke with Louis about his invention, but, like other contemporary
observers, did not seem to understand that what he saw was potentially far
more than an amusing trick.
Louis revised the book on his alphabet in 1837, the same year the school
published the first Braille book in the world, a three-volume history of
France. The publishing method consisted of full-cell blocks of Braille type.
While setting up the pages, students broke off unneeded dots from each block
to make the correct letters. The print shop at the school was directed by
Rémi Fournier, the student Valentin Haüy had brought along on his flight
from France nearly thirty years before.
What's Best? And Who Decides? It seems obvious today that these practical
inspirations should have been seen for the epoch-making advances they were.
It must have been electrifying for the students to be able to write and read
for the first time with speed and accuracy equaling or exceeding that of
many sighted people, and it must have been thrilling to observe.
The full extent of this triumph completely eluded authorities of the time,
however, for Louis' book was not the most heralded publishing project at the
school in the year 1837. Assistant director P. Armand Dufau, a former
geography teacher at the school, published The Blind: Considerations On
Their Physical, Moral And Intellectual State, With A Complete Description Of
The Means Suitable To Improve Their Lot Using Instruction And Work. Dufau's
book won the prestigious prize from the Académie Française which the year
before had been awarded to Alexis de Tocqueville for his well-known book on
America. Dufau, a staunch Braille opponent who believed Braille made the
blind "too independent," included no mention of his subordinate's innovation
in his book.
The prize from the Académie meant Dufau found his own fortunes sharply on
the rise, and he did use some of his new influence in a good cause. For
years, reports by government medical authorities induced to visit the school
by Dr. Pignier's constant pleas had noted that students there often had a
"sickly appearance" but nothing was done.
Finally, in 1838, poet and historian Alphonse de Lamartine toured the school
and was appalled at the terrible conditions. He made a powerful appeal to
France's Chamber of Deputies for a new building, declaring, "No description
could give you a true idea of this building, which is small, dirty, and
gloomy; of those passages partitioned off to form boxes dignified by the
name of workshops or classrooms, of those many tortuous, worm-eaten
staircases...If this whole assembly was to rise now and go en masse to this
place, the vote for this bill would be unanimous!" The speech was effective,
and plans began for a new school building across town in a more wholesome
location on the Boulevard des Invalides. Meanwhile, while the building was
under construction, Dufau forced Dr. Pignier from his position as director,
using his influence (and some imaginative embellishment) to convince
Ministry officials that Dr. Pignier was teaching history with a slant
unbecoming to the government. Dr.
Pignier was vulnerable; he had had a Catholic education in his youth (always
suspect in post-Revolutionary France), and he had made chronic trouble with
the authorities over adopting the Braille code and improving the poor
condition of the building.
Louis' deteriorating health forced him to turn down a job in a mountain
locale that might have even lengthened his life had he had the stamina to
make the journey--tutor to a blind prince of the Austrian royal family. At
last, he took a long leave of absence to regain strength in Coupvray.