3. Louis Braille didn’t let a childhood accident get him down but instead was inspired to invent a whole new language while still in his teens
As a young boy, Louis Braille was playing in his father’s workshop when he suffered a terrible accident. He was impaled in one eye and lost his sight in it. The eye also became infected and this spread to the other eye. Within a few days, he was completely blind, with no hope of regaining his sight. Since this was early-19th century France, it seemed likely that the young Louis would struggle through the rest of his life. However, he not only completed his education, he also invented a system of reading and writing that’s used by blind people right around the world to this day.
Born in a small town on the outskirts of Paris in January 1809, Braille was blind by the age of five. However, his parents did their best to give him a normal childhood. Using canes crafted by his father, he managed to explore his town and he excelled at school. Indeed, he was so bright that the local teacher and priests recommended that he study at the prestigious National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris.
At the Paris school, Braille and the other students ‘read’ using books designed by their teacher. However, these consisted of nothing more than raised lettering. They were costly to produce and reading them was a slow and frustrating process. Braille was soon determined to devise a better system. Inspired by a communications system used by the French Army, he came up with his own system. The new method was completed by 1824, when Braille was just 15. Within a few years, he had published his work nationally, though his special system was not embraced until after his death.
Braille spent most of the rest of his life perfecting the system he devised as a teenager. In 1854, two years after his death, his system was adopted by the National Institute for Blind Youth. After that, it spread rapidly through the French-speaking world and then through the wider world. While the technology used for producing braille scripts may have evolved, the system used by blind people today remains largely unchanged from that devised by the innovative teen a century ago.