HAUY, VALENTIN

born Nov. 13, 1745, Saint-Just-en-Chausse, France died March 18, 1822, Paris French professor of calligraphy known as the father and apostle of the blind. He was the brother of Ren-Just Hay. After seeing a group of blind men being cruelly exhibited in ridiculous garb in a Paris sideshow, Hay decided to try to make the life of the blind more tolerable and help them gain a sense of usefulness. He set out by hiring a blind beggar boy to submit to instruction. In 1784 he established the Institution for Blind Children, Paris (afterward a state-supported school for blind children), where Louis Braille, inventor of the most widely used alphabet for the blind, was a student and later a teacher. Hay foreshadowed Braille's work by discovering that sightless persons could decipher texts printed in embossed letters and by successfully teaching blind children to read.