BRAILLE, LOUIS

born Jan. 4, 1809, Coupvray, near Paris, Fr. died Jan. 6, 1852, Paris French educator who developed a system of printing and writing that is extensively used by the blind and that was named for him. Braille was himself blinded at the age of three in an accident that occurred while he was playing with tools in his father's harness shop. An awl slipped and plunged into his eye. Sympathetic ophthalmia and blindness followed. Nevertheless, he became an excellent organist and cellist. Upon receiving a scholarship, he went in 1819 to Paris to attend the National Institute for Blind Children, and from 1826 he taught there. Braille became interested in a system of writing, exhibited at the school by Charles Barbier, in which a message coded in dots was embossed on cardboard. When he was 15, he worked out an adaptation, written with a simple instrument, that met the needs of the sightless. He later took this system, which consists of a six-dot code in various combinations, and adapted it to musical notation. He published treatises on his type system in 1829 and 1837. For the last years of his life Braille was ill with tuberculosis. His remains, returned to his birthplace after his death, were in 1952 sent to Paris, to be buried in the Panthon.