How old was Louis Braille when he invent braille?

Answer 1

Louis Braille was twelve years old when he merely perfected the "Night writing" system that was invented by Charles Barbier in 1821. Barbier made this system for Napoleon so he could read messages at night without a lamp. Louis Braille perfected this system in 1821.

Answer 2

Louis was attending a school for the blind and a French soldier came in and showed him a system called 'night writing'. this was braille with 12 dots but it was unused because it was too hard. Louis seized the day and made an easier version a few months later it was complete.

convenient that you asked this because I'm studying Louis braille too :)

hope i helped!

Answer 2: Louis Braille was born in 1809 in the village of Coupvray in France, about 25 miles [40 km] from Paris. His father, Simon-René Braille, made a living as a harness maker. Perhaps young Louis often played in his father's workshop. On one occasion, however, it was the setting for a terrible accident. Gripping a sharp pointed tool-possibly an awl-Louis inadvertently plunged it into his eye. The damage was irreversible. Worse still, the infection soon spread to his other eye. At the tender age of three, Louis became totally blind.

Trying to make the best of the situation, Louis' parents and the parish priest, Jacques Palluy, arranged for Louis to sit in on classes held at the local school. Louis absorbed much of what he heard. In fact, some years he was at the head of his class! But there were limits to what a blind person could learn using methods that were designed for the sighted. Hence, in 1819, Louis was enrolled in the Royal Institute for Blind Youth.

The founder of the institute, Valentin Haüy, was one of the first to establish a program to help the blind to read. His desire was to combat the prevailing notion that blindness precluded a person from the benefits of a formal education. Haüy's early experiments involved embossing large raised letters on thick paper. Although crude, these efforts planted seeds that would later take root.

Braille learned how to read the large embossed letters in the books of Haüy's small library. He realized, however, that this approach to learning was slow and impractical. After all, letters were designed for the eyes-not the fingers. Fortunately, someone else who recognized these limitations was about to appear on the scene.

In 1821, when Louis Braille was just 12 years old, Charles Barbier, a retired French artillery captain, visited the institute. There he presented a means of communication called night writing, later called sonography. Night writing was developed for use on the battlefield. It was a tactile method of communication, using raised dots arranged in rectangular form six dots high by two dots wide. This concept of using a code to represent words phonetically struck a responsive chord at the school. Braille enthusiastically applied himself to this new approach and even made improvements to it. But to make the system truly practical, Braille had to persevere. He wrote in his diary: "If my eyes will not tell me about men and events, ideas and doctrines, I must find another way."

So for the next two years, Braille worked doggedly to simplify the code. Finally, he developed a refined and elegant method based on a cell only three dots high by two dots wide. In 1824, at the age of 15, Louis Braille completed a six-dot cell system. Soon thereafter, Braille began teaching at the institute, and in 1829 he published his unique method of communication known today by his name. Except for minor refinements, his system remains essentially unchanged to this day.

Making Braille Available Worldwide

The late 1820's saw the publication of the first book that explained Braille's raised-dot invention; but the invention was slow to gain wide acceptance. Even at the institute, the new code was not officially adopted until 1854-two years after Braille's death. Nevertheless, this vastly superior method eventually gained popularity.

Several organizations have produced Braille literature. The Watchtower Society began making such material available in 1912, when the code was still being standardized for the English-speaking world. Today, using advanced Braille printing methods, the Society embosses millions of pages each year in eight languages and distributes these to over 70 countries. Recently, the Society doubled its production capacity to meet the growing demand for Braille Bible literature.

Today the simple, well-crafted Braille code makes the written word available to millions who are visually impaired-thanks to the dedicated efforts of a young boy almost 200 years ago. (see Awake article Louis Braille-Bringing Light to Prisoners of Darkness)

Answer 3

He had a terrible accident as a child that caused him to lose his sight. When he was older he fought for a way for the blind to be able to read through his progression of raised dots. At the time there was a more long and complicated alphabet for the blind. Louis Braille's raised dots were more condensed and therefore took up less space. Over time his system prevailed and of course is still in use today.

Answer 4

The Braille system was based on a method of communication originally developed by Charles Barbier in response to Napoleon's demand for a code that soldiers could use to communicate silently and without light at night called night writing. Barbier's system of sets of 12 embossed dots encoding 36 different sounds was too difficult for soldiers to perceive by touch, and was rejected by the military. In 1821 he visited the National Institute for the Blind in Paris, where he met Louis Braille. Braille identified the two major defects of the code: first, by representing only sounds, the code was unable to give the orthography of the words; second, the human finger could not encompass the whole symbol without moving, and so could not move rapidly from one symbol to another. His modification was to use a 6 dot cell - the Braille system - representing all the letters of the alphabet. Braille as we know it today was devised in 1825 by Braille.

Answer 5

Louis Braille was 15 years old when he invented the braille system in 1824. He developed it as a way for visually impaired people to read and write using a series of raised dots.

Answer 6

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