Louis Braille in the Pantheon
N 48° 50.781 E 002° 20.709
31U E 451955 N 5410582
Louis Braille; January 4, 1809 – January 6, 1852) was the inventor of braille, a world-wide system used by blind and visually impaired people for reading and writing.
Waymark Code: WM370C
Location: France
Date Posted: 02/20/2008
Views: 85
His body was disinterred in 1952 (the centenary of his death) and honored with re-interment in the Panthéon in Paris.
Braille is read by passing the fingers over characters made up of an arrangement of one to six embossed points. It has been adapted to almost every known language.
Louis Braille became blind at the age of 3, when he accidentally stabbed himself in the eye with his father's awl. Louis rubbed his stabbed eye and then rubbed his other eye and an autoimmune disease called sympathetic ophthalmia spread to his other eye, therefore blinding him in both eyes.
At the very young age of 10, Braille earned a scholarship to the Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles (Royal Institution for Blind Youth) in Paris, one of the first of its kind in the world. The scholarship was his ticket out of the usual fate for the blind, begging for money on the streets of Paris. However, the conditions in the school were not notably better. Braille was served stale bread and water, and students were sometimes abused or locked up as a form of punishment.
Braille, a bright and creative student, became a talented cellist and organist in his time at the school, playing the organ for churches all over France.
At the school, the children were taught basic craftsman skills and simple trades. They were also taught how to read by feeling raised letters (a system devised by the school's founder, Valentin Haüy). However, because the raised letters were made using paper pressed against copper wire, the students never learned to write. Another disadvantage was that the letters weighed a lot and whenever people published books using this system, they put together a book with multiple stories in one in order to save money. This made the books sometimes weigh over a hundred pounds.
In 1821, Charles Barbier, a former soldier, visited the school. Barbier shared his invention called "sonography" a code of 12 raised dots and a number of dashes that let soldiers share top-secret information on the battlefield without having to speak. Although the code was too difficult for the average soldier, Braille picked it up quickly.
The same year Louis began inventing his raised-dot system with his father's stitching awl, finishing at age 15, in 1824. His system used only six dots and corresponded to letters, whereas Barbier's used 12 dots corresponding to sounds. The six-dot system allowed the recognition of letters with a single fingertip apprehending all the dots at once, requiring no movement or repositioning which slowed recognition in systems requiring more dots. These dots consisted of patterns in order to keep the system easy to learn. The Braille system also offered numerous benefits over Haüy's raised letter method, the most notable being the ability to both read and write an alphabet. Another very notable benefit is that because they were dots just slightly raised, there was a significant difference in make up.
(excerpts from wikipedia)
Description:
See Above
Date of birth: 01/04/1809
Date of death: 01/06/1852
Area of notoriety: Science/Technology
Marker Type: Crypt (below ground)
Setting: Indoor
Visiting Hours/Restrictions: 10am - 6.15pm.
Fee required?: Yes
Web site: [Web Link]
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