by Philippa Campsie
From the Editor: Philippa Campsie is a Toronto-based researcher studying the people and events surrounding the invention of Braille in France in the early nineteenth century. In 2016-17, she was given access to the papers of Charles Barbier at the Association Valentin Haüy and in the archives of the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, the latter being the school where Louis Braille studied and later taught. In 2021, she published her findings in Disability Studies Quarterly. That article is available at https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/
7499/5947. She has presented her research at the American Printing House for the Blind and at an online conference for the International Council on English Braille. She has also participated in podcasts created by the BBC and the Disability History Association and is working on a book about Charles Barbier and Louis Braille. She has generously contributed this article to the Braille Monitor as an expression of gratitude for the posting by the Jacobus tenBroek Library of Louis Braille’s 1829 book. Her research contains insights that enhance, and in some cases correct, what we believe we know about Louis Braille and his development of the Braille code. In the National Federation of the Blind, we celebrate Braille at every opportunity, and this article makes us aware of some of the milestones in its history that might otherwise go unnoticed. Here is the article:
The year 2025 is celebrated in France as the anniversary of the invention of Braille. In the United States, 2024 was designated as the anniversary year, allowing for two full years of celebration.
Mind you, these years represent only the beginning of the adventure that is Braille. There are many other milestones that call for celebration.
Louis Braille turned sixteen in January 1825. He had been at the Institution for Blind Youth in Paris for six years and had spent more than three of those years experimenting with a form of raised-point writing developed specifically for the blind by Charles Barbier, adopted by the school in 1821. The groundbreaking concept came with something equally precious—the tools that Louis used to create his own method. Barbier donated dozens of sets of these tools to the students.
Barbier’s method had been adopted mainly because it was easy to learn and allowed the students to take notes—something that had not been possible for them when raised print letters were used at the school. That was a huge advance for the students’ education, but the method took up a lot of space, and it did not include symbols for mathematics or music.
Although it is often said that Barbier’s method was phonetic, it existed from the beginning in an alphabetical form. Letters between Barbier and the director of the school indicate that students used the alphabetical form. Of course they did. They knew the alphabet, and they knew how to spell. Why would they bother to unlearn what they already knew in order to use phonetic spelling? And why would the school, which promoted conventional literacy, have allowed—let alone encouraged—them to do so?
In Louis Braille’s experiments with Barbier’s code, the eureka moment must have been the point at which Louis realized that dots represented a binary form of communication. Like modern computer code, each position could be zero or one, off or on. The lack of a dot in a certain position was as significant as the presence of a dot. This insight is at the heart of the Braille code, every bit as crucial as the six-dot cell. This year’s celebration marks this fundamental achievement.
It took Louis another four years to work out the details and get his ideas into print with the publication of his book, whose English title is Procedure for Writing Words, Music, and Plain-Song Using Dots for the Use of the Blind and Made Available to Them. Thanks to the National Federation of the Blind, the result can be seen online with French transcription and English translation at https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/braille/
thefirstpublicationofthebraillecode.html. That publication was a huge step forward, and we should mark the occasion in 2029.
Unfortunately, the first publication had one drawback—the use of dashes in numbers, punctuation, and musical notation. The dashes were hard to create and hard to decipher.
And here’s where we see another aspect of Louis Braille’s genius. He didn’t give up. Where others might have considered the task of eliminating the dashes too daunting, Braille stayed the course. He spent eight more years creating a dot-only method, the basis of the universal system we have today.
Unfortunately, the 1837 edition of his Procedure is not (yet) available online. Although it is called a “second edition,” it is a wholly different publication and a testament to Braille’s ingenuity in the way he managed to use six dots for everything that needed to be expressed. I hope that the 1837 edition can be posted online well before the 2037 celebrations get under way.
The “second edition” is also noteworthy for features that were not in the 1829 publication. For example, it demonstrates the use of Braille in Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, and English. The book used the Lord’s Prayer in these five languages to show that the method could be multilingual. In this way, Louis himself opened the path to international adoption, years before the rest of the world began to pay attention.
In the 1837 publication, Louis, who was by now twenty-eight years old, also introduced a new approach to abbreviation. The 1829 edition had included a version of speed writing that Braille called “stenographic,” but the 1837 edition offers a slightly different approach. Louis writes, “One should put only the letters strictly necessary for the pronunciation of words.” This sounds like a phonetic form of writing; in fact, Braille’s abbreviations went beyond phonetic spelling to tightly condensed words. For example, he suggests eliminating vowels that follow consonants, turning the French word verité (truth) into vrt.
As for Braille’s 1837 method for music notation, it was so successful that when a new director banned the use of Braille at the Paris school where Louis was now a teacher, Braille music notation still had to be used, because there was no workable alternative. Students were in the strange situation of having to use raised lettering for lyrics along with Braille notation for the music itself.
The official ban lasted four years. In 1844, when the grand new school building was officially opened, Braille was there to see his method demonstrated and reintroduced. Of course, most of the students had been using it in secret all along, because there was no other way for them to write notes. But we can still celebrate the victory of Braille over prejudice in 2044.
A final anniversary will be 2052, two hundred years since the death of Louis Braille. In 1952, his remains were transferred from the graveyard in his hometown of Coupvray and taken to the Panthéon in Paris, to be interred with France’s greatest statesmen, scientists, artists, and writers. He belongs in their company. The year 1852 also saw the first institutional adoption of Braille outside France—in Lausanne, Switzerland. A mere fifteen years after publication of the definitive edition of his work, Braille’s method was beginning to spread internationally.
Those are the main anniversaries within the lifetime of Louis Braille. The adoption of Braille around the world offers many other years to celebrate—in many cases, a different year for each country.
We need to recognize that the invention of Braille was not a one-time event, a single burst of inspiration by a sixteen-year-old that led to a new form of writing once and for all. We like our heroes to be young and their achievements to be spectacular. Louis Braille’s genius, however, was to persist in the face of early problems with his invention and resistance to the use of his code. That is what we should celebrate, this year and in 2029, 2037, 2044, and 2052.