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When Louis returned to the school in October, 1843, he found that he was about to sustain another defeat. Dufau was hard at work making still more changes, among them deleting "frivolous" subjects like history, Latin, and geometry from the curriculum, to allow time for more work-related training. Since winning the prestigious award some years earlier and engineering Pignier's removal, Dufau had sufficient official support to obtain a large budget increase for the school. He decided to revolutionize the school's standard reading medium--not using Braille's code but adopting a British system invented by John Alston of the Asylum for the Blind in Glasgow.Another print-like tactile system, Alston differed from Haüy in that it used very simplified letter forms without swirls or serifs. Alston had printed an entire Bible in (19 volumes) using this system a few years before. Dufau liked it very much.
A
Book-Burning and a Rebellion To dramatize and enforce the new system, Dufau made
a bonfire in the school's rear courtyard and burned not only the embossed books
created by Haüy's original process, but every book printed or hand transcribed
in Louis' new code--the school's entire library and the
product of nearly fifty years' work. To make sure no Braille would ever again be
used at the school, he also burned and confiscated the slates, styli, and other
Braille-writing equipment.
Outraged, the students rebelled. Behind Dufau's back, they wrote Braille even
without slates--sending messages and keeping secret diaries written with
knitting needles, forks or nails. Dufau's punishments for Braille use, which
included being slapped across the hands and sent to bed without dinner, were
completely ineffective. The older students taught the younger ones the system in
secret. Braille, once learned, proved impossible to suppress.
Finally, Dufau's clever assistant, Joseph Guadet, had been watching the students
and became an ardent Braille supporter, teaching himself to read and write the
code. He persuaded Dufau that if powerful people in government heard that the
students were unified in willfully defying Dufau's authority,
his job might be at risk. If, however, a student invented something successful,
the school would share the credit, which could only enhance the reputation of
its leader.
So, when the school moved into its new building in November, 1843, P. Armand
Dufau was a changed man, supplying every student with a new Braille slate.
Euphoric at having defeated the Braille ban, students got up a petition and sent
it to the government nominating Louis Braille for the French Legion of
Honor for making true communication possible for the blind. The petition,
however, was ignored.
Reversal of Fortune Louis' public triumph would finally come at the building's
dedication ceremony the following February. Dufau glowingly described Louis
Braille's system of writing with raised dots to the crowd, even having a student
(one of the newly admitted girls) give a demonstration. An official in the
audience cried out that it was all a trick, that the child writing Braille and
reading it back must have
memorized the text in advance. In reply, Dufau asked the man to find some
printed material in his pocket, which turned out to be a theater ticket, and to
read it to the student Braillist. The little girl reproduced the text and read
it back flawlessly before the man even returned to his seat. The crowd,
convinced, applauded wildly for a full six minutes.
Louis Braille spent the last eight years of his life teaching occasionally and
Brailling books for the school library school as he battled his declining
health. People were starting to call the dot system by his name,
"Braille," and a growing number of inquiries about it were reaching the school
from all over the world. When Dufau published the second edition of his
influential book in 1850, he devoted several enthusiastic pages to the Braille
system. Still, when Louis Braille died on January 6, 1852, just two days past
his forty-third birthday, not a single Paris newspaper noted his passing.
His
system survived, and in 1854, France adopted Braille as its official
communications system for blind people. The Braille system spread to Switzerland
soon after but encountered tremendous resistance in England, Germany and
America, and often for the same reason: Braille's seeming
opacity to the sighted because of its lack of resemblance to print.
The fact that the blind might want to write because they had something to say,
as well as read what others have written, incredibly seems never to have
occurred to many of these educators. The writing factor--Braille is easy to
write, while raised print letter forms are virtually impossible--was
a huge point in securing Braille's lasting place in its users' lives.
A later Braille reader, Helen Keller, wrote: "Braille has been a most precious
aid to me in many ways. It made my going to college possible--it was the only
method by which I could take notes of lectures. All my
examination papers were copied for me in this system. I use Braille as a spider
uses its web--to catch thoughts that flit across my mind for speeches, messages
and manuscripts."11 If Louis Braille had ever had the time to write his own
thoughts on solving problems, dealing with hardship, and persevering
through setbacks, few would disagree that would have been a story well worth
reading, regardless of what medium originally held the words.
Curiously, many educators of the blind seem to have made a highly personal
mission out of devising conflicting codes with seemingly little regard for their
practical implications. Ferocious partisanship developed over these code
systems.
The
United Kingdom seems to have been the one bright exception. Thomas
Rhodes Armitage, a wealthy physician who struggled with vision problems
himself, convened a committee of other blind people "with knowledge of at
least three systems of embossed type and having no financial interest in
any" to evaluate the various codes and make a decision on which one would be
best for Britain. During the two years the committee deliberated, they
surveyed dozens of blind readers- and two years later, in 1870, Braille won,
though it was many years more before it was fully implemented. 12 The United
States only fully came to the use of Braille in the twentieth century.
While many of the competing codes did not thrive much past the end of the
19th century, the innovators they attracted often did move Braille
publishing forward in unexpected ways. William Bell Wait, superintendent of
the New York Institute for the Blind, introduced a now almost forgotten code
called "New York Point" in 1868.
More lastingly, Wait gave an eloquent argument in the Senate Education
Committee that helped secure the first annual grant from Congress for
embossed books for the blind in 1879, thus securing an important financial
channel for publishing for the blind in the United States. Obsessed with
saving Braille paper, Wait also created the first two-sided simultaneous
mechanical embossing process for New York Point sometime in the 1890's,
doubling the information carrying capacity of each sheet of paper in a
Braille book, thus inventing interpoint. 13
In 1860, the first American institution to adopt Braille was, ironically,
the Missouri School for the Blind,14 located in St. Louis--a city named for
Louis IX of France, founder of the Quinze-Vingts hospice in Paris 600 years
before. 15 Modern Times The Quinze-Vingts still exists today and is now a
high-tech ophthalmologic hospital, as well as a residence for the blind.16
Ironically, just as St. Apollonia was thought to relieve toothache, and St.
Eutropius, dropsy, St. Ovid's special purpose was reputed to be curing
deafness. 17 The wooden stalls and benches used for St. Ovid's Fair were
destroyed in a fire in 1777. In 1792, the square where it had been held was
renamed "Place de la Revolution", By 1793, the only spectacle there was the
guillotine. Over 1,000 executions took place there, including those of King
Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette.
The original building of the Royal Institution for Blind Children later
served as an army barracks and then a warehouse. It was torn down in the
1930's and replaced by a post office, itself now vanished. The last building
Louis Braille would have known and where he died on the Rue des Invalid's is
still the location of the school for the blind today.
Valentin Haüy is one of the great humanitarians (joining, among others,
Abraham Lincoln, St. Francis of Assisi, and Florence Nightingale)
immortalized in the stone carvings adorning New York City's Riverside
Church. 18 His life and work are also remembered in a museum on Rue Duroc in
modern Paris, open Tuesday and Wednesday from 2:30-5 p.m, closed from July
1st to September 15th annually. Admission is free.
Louis
Braille was also not the only ground-breaking alumnus of the school's
early days. In 1830, Claude Montal, the first blind piano tuner and a
graduate of the school for the blind, started his career in Paris. By 1834
he had published "How to Tune Your Piano Yourself" and went on to open his
own shop. 20 The school has also produced an unprecedented stream of
world-famous organists that continues right up to our own time, including
Louis Vierne, André Marchal, and Jean Langlais. The present organist at
Notre-Dame Cathedral, Jean-Pierre Leguay, is also blind.
Louis Braille's will, dictated to a notary less than a week before his
death, included bequests not only to his family, but to the servant who
cleaned his room, the infirmary aide, and the night watchman at the school.
His clothes and personal belongings went to his students as mementos. He
made one odd request, instructing friends to burn a small box in his room
without opening it. After his death, they were unable to resist a peek and
found the box stuffed with IOUs in Braille from students who had borrowed
money from their generous teacher. The notes were finally burned in keeping
with his wishes.
Upon Louis Braille's death, Hippolyte Coltat inherited his piano and worked
hard to advance his legacy. His warm recollections of his teacher and friend
at a memorial service at the school served as Braille's first biography.
Another of Louis Braille's friends, Gabriel Gauthier, would outlive him only
a short time. He also died of tuberculosis.
The Braille home in Coupvray, still standing, has also become a museum.
Louis Braille was originally buried in a simple grave in the small cemetery
in his hometown. In 1952, on the one-hundredth anniversary of his death,
public feeling grew that his remains should be moved to the Pantheon in
Paris, where France's national heroes are buried. The mayor of Coupvray
protested that Louis Braille was a true child of the area and that some of
him should remain in his home village. His hands were separated from his
arms and re-buried separately in Coupvray.
The rest of his body was interred in the Pantheon following a huge public
ceremony at the Sorbonne attended by dignitaries from all over the world,
including Helen Keller, who gave a speech in what the New York Times
reported as "faultlessly grammatical" French. She declared, to a rousing
ovation from the hundreds of other Braille readers in attendance, that "we,
the blind, are as indebted to Louis Braille as mankind is to Gutenberg". As
the coffin was borne through the streets of Paris towards the Pantheon,
hundreds of white canes tapped along behind in what the Times, its own
fortunes founded in literacy and publishing, called (with no apparent hint
of irony) a "strange, heroic procession."
The Pantheon is in the Paris' fifth arrondissement, only a few blocks from
the original school for the blind.
Louis Braille's writing system eventually spread throughout the world and,
of course, became known by his name. Curiously, considering that Louis'
father was a harness and saddle maker, there is an English word, brail,
which describes a rope used in sailing and is derived from a 15th century
French word braiel, meaning "strap". Thus, it seems reasonable to speculate
that the family name was probably derived from an ancestor's similar
occupation. 21 Despite the fact that the Braille dots still do not resemble
print letters (a complaint often heard to this day), it has been adapted to
nearly every language on earth and remains the major medium of literacy for
blind people everywhere. Debunking the myth that Braille is somehow "too
difficult" for the sighted to learn, sighted transcribers have long been a
primary source of textbooks for blind students. Thousands of these
volunteers learned Braille as an avocation and churned out books one cell at
a time from kitchen tables and
bedroom offices everywhere for many years with little fanfare. Their efforts
in the United States have, if anything, expanded over the last decade with
the coming of the computer age and the mainstreaming of blind students in
public schools.
Whether through software translators or direct entry, Braille turned out to
be extraordinarily well suited to computer-assisted production due to its
elegance and efficiency. Braille displays for navigating and reading
computer text in real time have become increasingly affordable and reliable
as well. Thus, the computer age created an unprecedented and continuing
explosion in the amount of Braille published and read throughout the world.
The End