BRAILLE HISTORY
Louis Braille invented Braille, when he was about ten years old!!!
Louis had perfectly fine vision when he was born. He lost his eyesight from an injury to one eye. His father was a carpenter. Louis helped his dad build stuff for around his house. He was missing around with one of his father’s tools, in the tool shed. His dad had told him not to though, and Louis found out why… The tool he was playing with slipped, and cut Louis’s eye. When his parents found him, he was unconscious, and blood was coming out of his eye, it was all over his face already. They took him to the doctor, but no one could do much for him, everyone said he wouldn’t be able to see out of that eye again… A few months later, he went back to the doctor, because he was having trouble with his other eye. The doctor found out that the injury to the first eye had spread an infection to the other eye. He started to see blurry, and then he only could see shadows. Then he could only see a little light, but then he couldn’t see anything after awhile… By then, he had started to get used to using a cane. After some time he was able to walk to school himself, but there was the problem that he couldn’t see to read So his father made wooden boards with nails to form the shape of letters, but of course a book would be way to large. One letter took about one whole square board, but letters were different sizes. This caused another problem, so Louis started to try to figure out a better system. After a lot of hard thinking, he came up with the idea of a system with only a few nails that would use all 25 letters (since his language didn’t use the letter w). He tried a two column by three-row system, because print letters are vertical, and this would save more space. It would also be easier to read with your fingers. A two by two wouldn’t have enough combinations, and a three by three would have to many, and take up extra space. As you can see, there are plenty of reasons why Braille is written in this form. Remember: he was using nails, and for one thing, you couldn’t fell nine nails together vary quickly unless you have big hands. Will there are plenty of other reasons. Anyway, he created the Braille alphabet using a certain pattern, which tells you that “w” wasn’t letter he made. The letter “w” is the only letter in the alphabet that has a dot six without dot three, more on that later. He did all of this when he was only ten years old to the time he was twelve he had everything figured out.
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