A captain in Napoleons army named Charles Barbier was ordered by Napoleon to make a system for soldiers to send messages during the night to each other without giving away their location which would happen if they used lights. Barbier did make a system of 12 dots with some missing in certain spots that encoded the alphabet but Napoleon and Napoleons army never really used it because it was to hard to use and to hard to learn. A boy named Louis braille had a father that worked as a leather worker and had lots of tools that had to be kept very sharp because leather is tough, so Louis’ father had big, and sharp scissors and a very large cone shaped knife used for making holes in the leather. It takes a very strong, firm, and skilled worker to use them as safely as possible and a three year old boy is not very strong, firm, and skilled so it makes sense that when three year old Louis tried to use his fathers tools he stabbed his eyeball that got infected causing him to go blind in both eyes. Even though he was blind he was very smart and attended the first school for blind people. The master of the school made a system for blind people to read that was just the letters of the alphabet raised up on the page that all the kids agreed was to complex. Some how Louis heard about Barbier’s system and tried to use it but it was to big and so Louis changed it from 12 dots to 6 and was able to encode the 64 uppercase and lower case letters of the alphabet.
School Essays 