Precious Pods

For the harnessmaker of Coupvray, a village 20 miles east of Paris, it was an unusually busy day, and he was paying no attention to his three-year-old son playing in the shop. Then suddenly the child began to scream, and in an instant the horrified harnessmaker saw what had happened. The awl the boy had been playing with had slipped into his eye. By the end of that week in 1812, little Louis Braille was totally blind.

In time, he was to make the most of his affliction. He lived out his life as a blind, wasted consumptive, but he devised a system of reading and writing that opened the world of letters to millions of sightless people. Last week, marking the 100th anniversary year of his death, the blind were not alone in paying him tribute. With President Auriol leading the way, all of France was singing his praises.

In Paris, Archbishop Maurice Feltin celebrated a special Mass at Notre Dame. At the Sorbonne, more than 100 blind delegates from 22 countries assembled for a memorial in Braille's honor. Meanwhile, the citizens of Coupvray performed a ceremony of their own. They unearthed Braille's remains, and, keeping a relic for themselves, sent the coffin to Paris. There, escorted by a column of blind men, each armed with a white cane, Braille's body was finally placed where Frenchmen felt it rightfully belonged--in the Pantheon, France's Westminster Abbey.

Cumbersome & Slow. In his life, Louis Braille won little acclaim. He was just another blind man, and in those days few people bothered much about the blind. Only one school -- the Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugles in Paris--was making any notable attempt at all to teach the blind to read. But even its method (big letters embossed on paper) was hopelessly cumbersome and slow.

Nevertheless, at 13, Louis Braille was placed in the school, and under the kindly eye of its founder, Valentin Hauey, he did make progress. For one thing, Hauey saw to it that Braille learned to play the organ, and out of the institution's pitiful collection of embossed books, each divided into 20 parts, each part weighing 20 pounds, Haueytaught the boy the rudiments of reading. Though perpetually racked by his cough, Louis proved an able student. "This sad little dark boy," as Hauey called him, became both a teacher and an accomplished musician.

Thieves & Urchins. In spite of this success, Louis remained a tormented soul. He was still the victim of the school's thieving servants ("The blind are prey to anyone who wishes to prey . . ."), still a target for jeering urchins in the street ("The blind are animals to the Parisians"). But worst of all was the thought of being cut off from virtually all books and written knowledge. "How can I arrange to see?" Louis wrote in his clumsy fashion one day. "How is it possible for me to read that which has been set down by the seeing?" Louis decided that the blind could never master a rapid reading of the ordinary alphabet. They needed--"a device that has nothing to do with the eyes."

The clue for that device came from a strange source: an army captain had invented a system of dot-and-dash symbols which could be punched out on thick paper and read by touch at night. When Braille heard about it, he got the idea of inventing an alphabet code of his own. The result was the Braille system, based on various arrangements of from one to six dots.

For five years, Louis worked on his code, translating every letter into the simplest possible cluster of dots. He also invented a special stylus and slate with which the blind could write, started working on a system of musical and mathematical notation. Meanwhile, tapping his way about "in the dark hours and crooked passages," he began teaching his method to his own pupils.

Mandarin & Swahili. Beyond that tiny circle, no one paid much attention to his system. The academicians ignored him, and for a while so did his own school. It was not until the Blind and Deaf-Mute Congress of 1878 that Braille's dots won final international recognition. After that, the system began to spread--to the Mandarin of China, the Araucanian of Chile, the Swahili of East Africa, to 49 different languages in all.

Louis Braille himself never lived to see the day, but on his deathbed, he seemed to know it was coming. "Oh, unsearchable mystery of the human heart," he said to a friend. "I am convinced that my mission on earth is accomplished." Last week, the mission he performed was put into words by Helen Keller. "We, the blind," said she at the Sorbonne ceremony, "are as indebted to Louis Braille as mankind is to Gutenberg . . . The raised letters under our fingers are precious pods from which has sprouted our intellectual wealth. Without a dot system, what a chaotic, inadequate affair our education would be!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.