Happy Birthday Grimm and Braille

It’s the birthday of Jacob Grimm, born in Hanau, Germany (1785). He and his younger brother Wilhelm, who was born a year later, collected and published Grimm’s Fairy Tales in 1812, which led to the birth of the study of folklore.

It’s the birthday of the man who invented a system of reading and writing for the blind, Louis Braille, born in Coupvray, France (1809). He was blinded in his father’s harness shop when he was three years old. But even without his eyesight, he was the best student in his school, and went on to become a famous organist and cellist in Paris.

But when he was still a student, Louis Braille was frustrated by his inability to read and write. Then, he heard about a French army officer who had devised a system of written communication of raised dots and dashes for nighttime battles. Braille borrowed the idea of the dots, and set about creating an alphabet that could be read by touch. He decided that each letter would be represented by a different arrangement of six dots packed close enough that each letter could be read by a single fingertip.

Braille died in 1852, and his alphabet for the blind didn’t come into widespread use until 1878, when it was presented at an International Congress in Paris. It went on to be used for virtually every major world language, and it was adapted for mathematical calculations and musical notations. Braille’s system made it possible for the first time for the blind to learn to read and write and to enter practical professions.

But today, reading and writing of Braille is something of a dying art. There are now far more audio versions of books than there are books printed in Braille, and there are software programs to convert written text into audio. Today only about 10 percent of blind children in this country learn to read Braille.