Louis Braille, blinded at the age of…

Louis Braille, blinded at the age of three in an accident, improves upon a complex military code for night communications that uses dots-and-dashes.

Braille, who began in 1821 at the age of fifteen to turn this code into a system of printing and writing for the blind, had first published his dot system in 1827 under the title Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them; he had later extended his system to include notation for mathematics and music.

Braille has become a well-respected teacher at the Royal Institution for Blind Youth.

In 1839 he publishes details of a method he has developed for communication with sighted people, using patterns of dots to approximate the shape of printed symbols.

Braille and his friend Pierre Foucault will go on to develop a machine to speed up the somewhat cumbersome system.

Braille is admired and respected by his pupils, but his system will not be taught at the Institute during his lifetime.