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200th Anniversary of the Birth of Louis Braille Scott 1431 (2009) On November 4, 2009, Vatican City issued a stamp in honor of Louis Braille, a French educator and inventor of the reading and writing system used by visually-impaired people which carries his name. The stamp shown above was the first stamp issued by Vatican City to contain characters expressed in the Braille system. The braille characters on the stamp spell out "Braille-SCV-0.65". Born in 1809, young Louis was blinded in one eye at age three as a result of an accident in his father's harness making shop. A subsequent infection spread to both eyes, leaving him totally blind. Despite a lack of resources in place for the blind, he excelled in his education and received a scholarship to France's Royal Institute for Blind Youth. At the Institute, inspired by a system developed by Charles Barbier, Braille began working on an enhancement. His system employed a tactile code that included a series of six raised dots to represent the letters of the alphabet. This system allowed blind people to read and write quickly and efficiently, and it was compact enough to be adapted to a variety of uses, including music. Braille's motivation behind the development of his system can be summed up in his statement: "Access to communication in the widest sense is access to knowledge, and that is vitally important for us if we [the blind] are not to go on being despised or patronized by condescending sighted people. We do not need pity, nor do we need to be reminded we are vulnerable. We must be treated as equals – and communication is the way this can be brought about."  Engraving of Louis Braille, by Henri Thiriat (1887) From Wikimedia Commons, in the Public Domain Braille went on to serve as a professor at the Institute and spent the remainder of his life refining and extending his system, which is truly a revolutionary invention. In 1878, the World Congress of Education for the Blind declared the Braille system a universal method, and it has been adapted for use in languages worldwide. Having suffered from poor health during the course of his lifetime, Braille died in 1852 at the age of 43, probably due to tuberculosis. REFERENCES: |
