By: Kenji History of Braille

1809 Louis Braille born in Coupvary, France. When he was three, he was playing with some of his fathers tools and injured his eye.

1821 Braille experiments with “night writing,” a raised-dot system developed for the French military by M. Charles Barbier. He originally created this system because Napoleon needed a code that soldiers could use to communicate silently and without light at night. This was called night writing. Braille, tried to use this type of “night writing” to help blind people to be able to read.

1832 Samuel Gridley Howe, superintendent of the New England Asylum for the Blind (now the Perkins School for the Blind), develops Boston Line Type based on letter shapes, after observing European blind education practices.

1840 Use of braille temporarily banned by Royal Institution director Pierre Dufau.

1852 Louis Braille dies in Coupvray at 43.

1909 The New York Board of Education selects American Braille over New York Point following contentious public hearings to decide which system to adopt in its public schools. New York Point’s general lack of capitals, hyphens, and apostrophes, which made it seem less literate than braille, was a deciding factor.

1991 Braille Authority of North America and the International Council on English Braille embark on an as yet unattained Unified English Braille Code.

Today Braille is still use by Blind people all over the world. It is used in books, sighs, and even on food labels.