january 5th

5th january : Louis Braille Day

Louis Braille was born on 4th january 1809 in the village of coupvrav,paris.


His father was a saddlemakker.At the age of 3 he seriously Wounded an eye while playing in his father's workshop and gradually lost his sight.


Despite his handicap he attended the village school,where he stood out for his intelligence and exceptional memory. His parents decided to send him to the Royal Institution for the Young blind in paris.


Louis Braille was born on 4th January 1809 in the village of Coupvray, Paris.


His father was a saddlemaker. At the age of three, he seriously wounded an eye while playing in his father’s workshop and gradually lost his sight.


Despite his handicap, he attended the village school, where he stood out for his intelligence and exceptional memory.

His parents decided to send him to the Royal Institution for the Young Blind in Paris.


He started there on the 15th February 1819, at the tender age of ten. At the time, the Royal Institution occupied a building, no longer standing, in the 5th District on the corner of rue des Ecoles and rue du Cardinal Lemoine.


The premises were cramped, damp, poorly heated and unhealthy; it has been suggested that Louis Braille’s time spent there brought about the tuberculosis he was subsequently to die of.


Charles Barbier de La Serre presented his system of “night writing”, which he had originally devised for use in the dark by the army, to the Headmaster of the Royal Institution for the Young Blind in 1821.


Louis Braille, who was then only 12, jumped on it. He noted the drawbacks inherent in the system, although it was revolutionary compared with the previous method of embossed script that had been in use since 1784 when it was introduced by Valentin Haüy.


Indeed the Barbier system relied on counting dots that represented sounds, with no representation of grammar or punctuation, and did not enable the writing of mathematics or music. Louis Braille was an assiduous student during the day.


Thus it was that he devoted his nights and his summer holidays at Coupvray to his research and trials.


At the end of 1824, not yet aged 16, he put the finishing touches to his own alphabetical method.


In 1828, at the age of 19, he was appointed teacher and put in charge of teaching general education and music. He wrote a “Method for Writing the words, music and plainchant with dots for the use of the blind and arranged for them”, which came out in 1829. “Braille” was born.


His definitive version, such as has been used for over 110 years now, dates from 1837, the year when Louis Braille published the second edition of his work.


He was ill from the age of 26, suffering the first attacks of the tuberculosis that he was to die of. In 1840, he withdrew from teaching music.


He passed away on the 6th January 1852 in the building currently housing the National Institute for the Young Blind and was buried at Coupvray.


Commermorative Coins , INDIA A Set of Two Coins Rs 100 and Rs 2 were Released by Indian Government Mint to Commemorate the 200th birth Anniversary of Louis Braille