40 Fun Facts About Louis Braille

When Louis Braille's remains moved to Paris in 1952, which part of him stayed in his home village?

His hands were kept in an urn in the village cemetery, a symbolic tribute to the man whose touch-reading system they had shaped.

Which sharp workshop tool stabbed three-year-old Louis Braille in the eye and cost him his sight?

An awl slipped as the toddler copied his father punching holes; infection then spread to the other eye, and by five he was completely blind.

What was Louis Braille's position at his Paris school when he worked out his raised-dot alphabet?

A student of just fifteen, he had spent three years of evenings and holidays punching dots before showing his code to the school's director.

Which famous blind author gave a speech in French in Paris in 1952 to honour Louis Braille?

Helen Keller was also made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour on that visit, and she compared the inventor's gift to that of Gutenberg.

Which company redrew its homepage logo in braille dots in January 2006 to honour Louis Braille?

Google spelled its own name in raised-dot letters, marking 197 years since Louis Braille was born.

NASA's Deep Space 1 probe flew past which kind of object named after Louis Braille in 1999?

An asteroid found in 1992 became 9969 Braille after a public naming contest, and the probe swept within 26 km of it.

A century after Louis Braille died, France reburied him in which Paris monument to national heroes?

The Panthéon also holds Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Marie Curie, so the 1952 move placed a village craftsman's son among France's greats.

World Braille Day falls on 4 January each year because that date marks what in Louis Braille's life?

His birthday, 4 January 1809, has been an official UN observance since 2019, promoting braille as a route to equal rights.

Which letter did Louis Braille place at the very end of his alphabet because French barely used it?

W was not part of the official French alphabet of his day, so its pattern sits after the accented letters instead of between V and X.

Louis Braille first learned letter shapes at home by feeling which objects set out on wooden boards?

Nails hammered into boards formed letters he could trace, a homemade lesson from parents who could both read and write.

How many raised dots make up one full cell in Louis Braille's alphabet?

Six dots, set in two columns of three, give 63 raised patterns plus a blank: enough for letters, numbers, punctuation and music.

Louis Braille's father Simon-René ran a respected village workshop in which trade?

Harness making for the district's horses paid well enough for Simon-René to buy land, farm buildings and a vineyard.

Besides the cello, which instrument did Louis Braille play well enough to hold posts in Paris?

Organ playing won him posts at two Paris churches, Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs and later Saint-Vincent-de-Paul.

Before Louis Braille's dots, how were the few books at his Paris school made readable by touch?

Embossed print letters were pressed into heavy wet paper, making books so bulky and costly that the school had opened with only three.

Which illness, long thought to have killed Louis Braille at 43, also forced him to stop teaching?

Tuberculosis was diagnosed in 1835 and weakened his voice so much that his classes struggled to hear him; he died two days after turning 43.

What does Louis Braille's childhood home, a listed historic building, house today?

A museum now fills the old family house, keeping many of his original printed works and a slate for decapoint, his second writing system.

Whose twelve-dot touch code, brought to his Paris school in 1821, inspired Louis Braille's alphabet?

Charles Barbier was a former artillery officer with a passion for shorthand, and he also designed the punch and grooved board for making dots.

In which village east of Paris, home to his father's workshop, was Louis Braille born?

Coupvray later renamed its main square after him and raised a large monument there.

Who founded the Paris school for blind children that Louis Braille entered at the age of ten?

Valentin Haüy, a philanthropist with full vision himself, began by teaching a 17-year-old blind beggar to read within three months.

Louis Braille's own Paris school made his dot system official only after which event?

His death came in 1852, and the school adopted the system two years later because its blind pupils insisted on it.

What did Pierre-Armand Dufau do to Louis Braille's dot code on taking over the Paris school in 1840?

Banned it: Dufau forbade the code to pupils and teachers alike until his deputy, Joseph Guadet, won him round and it returned in 1844.

Louis Braille's first published alphabet mixed dots with which other raised marks, dropped by 1837?

Dashes proved too hard to tell apart by touch, so his second edition kept only the dots.

In Louis Braille's code, the digits 1 to 9 and 0 borrow the dot patterns of which run of letters?

A to J double as the ten digits, and the next ten letters simply add one lower dot to those same patterns.

The twelve-dot code that inspired Louis Braille stood for what, instead of letters of the alphabet?

Spoken sounds, 36 of them, were all the older code could show, so it had no way to spell a word or mark punctuation.

By which name is the twelve-dot touch code that inspired Louis Braille's alphabet now usually known?

Night writing earned its name from the idea that soldiers could read it in the dark, though its inventor's own book pitched it at blind readers.

Which country minted a two-rupee coin in 2009 to mark 200 years since Louis Braille was born?

India issued a 100-rupee coin as well, while Belgium and Italy struck 2-euro coins for the same bicentenary.

Louis Braille grew up with three siblings; where did he come in the family's birth order?

The youngest by a wide margin, Louis was born more than ten years after the next child, his sister Marie Céline.

Which country's schools for the blind held out against Louis Braille's code until the 1910s?

United States schools were split between rival touch alphabets in a quarrel known as the War of the Dots, decades after an 1878 congress in Paris had backed braille.

Louis Braille punched his dots into paper with a slate and which pointed writing tool?

A stylus pressed each dot into heavy paper held in the slate, and he soldered metal strips across it to keep his lines straight.

Louis Braille's later system, decapoint, let the blind write letters that which group could read?

Sighted people could read decapoint untrained because its dots traced ordinary letter shapes, each built on a grid ten dots high.

What was the subject of the first full-length book published in Louis Braille's dot system, in 1837?

French history was the topic of that volume, a short survey of the nation's past of which only three copies are known to survive.

Louis Braille's damp Paris school building had served as what during the French Revolution?

A prison in the Revolution, the building was more than 200 years old, filthy and hard for blind children to move around.

On weekly walks to the botanical gardens, what kept Louis Braille and his blind classmates together?

A long rope that every child held kept the group in line through the city streets, on outings Louis especially enjoyed.

Who gave Louis Braille private lessons in his village and later arranged his Paris scholarship?

The parish priest, Abbé Palluy, saw how capable the blind boy was and, helped by a local nobleman, found him a funded place in the capital.

What did Louis Braille's father carve so the blind boy could find his own way around the village?

A walking cane of carved wood let him tap his way along the lanes; his parents wanted him independent when many blind people had to beg.

Which local remedy, applied to Louis Braille's injured eye, probably made the damage worse?

Lily water did nothing to stop the infection, which soon reached his other eye as well.

Which blind British doctor championed Louis Braille's code and founded what became the RNIB?

Thomas Armitage's society picked braille over rival raised scripts, and by 1882 he could report it was used in almost every school for the blind.

How did ten-year-old Louis Braille and his father make the four-hour journey to Paris in 1819?

By stagecoach he reached the school where he would spend the rest of his life, first learning and then teaching.

The 2017 London stage show The Braille Legacy told Louis Braille's story in which theatrical form?

A musical directed by Thom Southerland, it opened at the Charing Cross Theatre with Jérôme Pradon in the cast.

Which instrument did Louis Braille buy for himself out of his salary as a teacher in Paris?

A piano came out of his 300-franc salary, which also went on loans to friends in need and on paying helpers to copy books in his code.