How was braille invented

Day 294 / 365

Braille is a writing system used by blind people. It consists of holes or protruding dots on a piece of paper. A person can run their fingers through them in order to read them.

Today I found out how braille was invented. As is with most inventions, this one also came about as a result of necessity. Back in the 1800s, A French man named Charles Barbier identified a big problem that his army men were facing. Soldiers were using lamps to read combat messages in the dark. This made them easier to be seen by the enemy, and many were killed because of this.

So Charles developed a new system of writing messages, something he termed as “night writing”. This was quite similar to the braille system we have today. There were blocks of 12 dots on a paper, each representing a letter. The problem with this system was that it was hard to read all the dots with just one touch.

Louis Braille, a blind Frenchman, later improved on this night writing technique. He was able to reduce the cell size to just 6 dots, thus making it easy to feel one cell with a single touch.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — Should you quit social media?