Louis Braille Trivia Quiz

Answer: Coupvray

On January 4, 1809 Louis Braille was born in Coupvray, a village 25 miles east of Paris. He was the youngest of four children born to Simon-Rene and Monique Braille.

Answer: Accidental injury by a sharp object

At age three Louis accidentally injured one eye with an awl in his father's harness and saddle-making shop. The inflammation from the injury spread and within about a year Louis was totally blind due to sympathetic ophthalmia.

Answer: He attended a school for the blind

Louis attended regular school classes with sighted children for several years. In 1819 at age ten he began attending the Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles in Paris. This school was established by Valentin Haüy in 1784 and was the first school for the blind. Haüy had devised a method for printing books with embossed letters for blind students.

When Louis began his studies, the school had 100 students and only 14 books with embossed print. The school was housed in a 200-year-old building which was poorly ventilated, had wet clammy walls and smelled of mildew. Water for cooking and washing came straight from the River Seine without any filtering.

The building had previously served as a seminary and a prison.

Answer: Charles Barbier

In 1821 a French army officer, Charles Barbier, presented his night writing code at the school. He created this tactile code to help soldiers communicate during the noise and confusion of battle and also at night so that a light would not betray them to the enemy. The system used 12 raised dots. It was based on sounds and did not have symbols for the actual letters of the alphabet or punctuation marks. Louis created a 6-dot Braille cell, half the size of Barbier's cell. The Braille cell consists of two vertical rows of three dots. There are 64 possible combinations of these 6 dots. He created symbols for the letters of the alphabet, numbers and punctuation marks. He also created a code to read and write musical notations. Unlike Haüy's embossed print letters and Barbier's 12-dot cell, the Braille cell was just the right size to read with the fingertip. You can see the Braille alphabet at: www.deafblind.com/braille.html.
Morse Code was created by Samuel Morse in 1838.
Laura Bridgman, although not as well known as Helen Keller, was the first deaf-blind person to learn language. She was born in 1829, five years after the invention of the Braille alphabet.
Helen Keller was born in 1880. Commenting on the importance of Louis Braille's invention Keller said, "We the blind are as indebted to Louis Braille as mankind is to Gutenberg."

Answer: They felt the raised dots would not hold up to heavy use such as in textbooks

The advantage of the Braille code as opposed to the engraved print alphabet was that blind people could not only read but they could also write. However, the teachers were somewhat uncomfortable with the fact that the blind could communicate independently and the teachers could not read this communication unless they learned the code themselves. Braille written with a slate and stylus does create a soft punching noise. No complaints were voiced about the durability of the Braille dots.

In the late 1830s the school director, a former geography teacher, P. Armand Dufau, strongly supported another embossed print code called Alston type.

He was so vehemently opposed to the Braille code that he burned all of the school's books that used Haüy's embossed type and the Braille code.

Although slates and styli were confiscated from the students, they rebelled and continued to write Braille using knitting needles, forks and nails. By 1843 the assistant director had convinced Dufau it was in his best interest to lift the Braille ban.

Answer: harpsichord

Louis Braille played the piano, organ and cello. He supplemented his income as a teacher by playing the organ at Paris churches. His organ playing was praised by Felix Mendelssohn. He created a music code and in 1829 published this in a book entitled, "Method of Writing Words, Music and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for use by the Blind and Arranged for Them."

Answer: A way for blind people to write letters to sighted people

Raphigraphy was a way for blind people to independently write letters to sighted people. Raised dots were used to represent print letters. This process was time consuming (the letter "I" required 16 individually punched dots). In 1841 a blind friend, Pierre Foucault, created a piston board that produced all of the dots for a single letter at once.

This could be considered the precursor to the dot matrix printer of today.

Answer: A collection of IOUs

The box contained Braille IOUs from students for the many generous loans made by their teacher. As well as leaving money to his family, Louis left bequests to his former school to help blind students find jobs. He also left money to a sighted boy who acted as his guide, a night watchman and a boy who worked in the infirmary. Louis had forgiven all debts in his will.

The wooden box was burned in accordance with his wishes but only after it had been opened.

Answer: Tuberculosis

On January 6, 1852, two days after his 43rd birthday, Louis Braille died from tuberculosis. He had developed the ailment in his mid-twenties. Many students and teachers at the school suffered from bad health, no doubt partially due to the unhealthy environment of the school.

Answer: Paris

Although the students at the institute were enthusiastic about the Braille code, Braille did not become the official method for reading and writing for the blind throughout the world until decades after his death. His death in 1852 was not noted in a single French newspaper, and he was buried without fanfare in the village cemetery of his hometown, Coupvray.

In 1952 on the 100th anniversary of his death, Braille's body was exhumed and buried with great ceremony in the Pantheon in Paris. However, in a somewhat macabre tribute to its world-famous son, Coupvray in the person of its mayor insisted on having Braille's hands removed from his body and buried in the village cemetery.