The Alphabet of Touch: The Hidden History of Braille - Episode 15

00:00:02: Let me start with something that sounds completely obvious.

00:00:05: Reading is something you do with your eyes, right?

00:00:08: Words on a surface light bouncing off them Eyes receiving the light brain decoding it.

00:00:14: That's reading!

00:00:15: That just what it is Except... It isn't Not really.

00:00:19: Reading is the decoding of system symbols that represent language.

00:00:23: The eyes are just tool most us used to use.

00:00:26: They're not only tools they never were.

00:00:29: You can read with your fingertips and the system that made it possible for millions of people.

00:00:35: The six-dot code used all over world today in every major written language on Earth, essentially unchanged was not invented by a committee of scientists or government program or prestigious research institution.

00:00:48: A was worked out by a fifteen year old boy In school workshop.

00:00:53: using tool almost identical to one blinded him when he was three years old.

00:00:58: I find this story almost impossible to believe the first time you hear it and then look at up, and its all true.

00:01:04: Every part of it.

00:01:05: Today we're talking about Braille The real story where it came from which includes a myth i'm going after dismantle because popular version isn't quack right?

00:01:14: How teenage in Paris cracked problem that educated adults had been failing solve for decades And why his own school band is now read by fingers on every country.

00:01:27: I'm Alexandra, welcome to The Hidden Life of Things.

00:01:30: Everyday history for anyone who's ever looked at something ordinary and wondered how did this actually get here?

00:01:37: To really feel why the story matters you need start where blind people were before Braille existed And answer is mostly excluded from almost everything that mattered In a world before audio recordings Before screen readers Before any technology we have now.

00:01:53: Literacy was the gateway to almost everything, education law religion science literature employment.

00:02:00: If you couldn't access the written word You were dependent on other people for most of what mattered not as an inconvenience As a way Of life.

00:02:08: in medieval Europe blind People are generally expected To beg.

00:02:11: sometimes they Were paraded through city streets and ridiculous costumes as A form of public entertainment.

00:02:17: The idea that a blind person could receive a formal education or the professional position, contribute to intellectual life wasn't just uncommon.

00:02:25: It was for most of history considered essentially impossible not because people were necessarily cruel but because nobody had built the tools.

00:02:34: .The first serious crack in that wall came in seventeen eighty-four in Paris A man named Valentin Howie –not blind himself–but apparently genuinely disturbed by watching blind people being mocked and public founded the world's first school for blind students, The Royal Institution For Blind Youths radical.

00:02:53: But his approach to teaching reading had a fundamental problem.

00:02:56: He embossed regular printed letters onto thick paper.

00:02:59: raised versions of the letter cited people used.

00:03:02: The thinking being if blind students can feel the shape of their letters they can learn to recognize them by touch.

00:03:08: in the same way sighted people learned to recognise them by sight.

00:03:12: reasonable and theory.

00:03:13: a genuine disaster in practice, and here is why.

00:03:16: The letters of the alphabet were designed over centuries for their eye —the eye-is fast.

00:03:21: it takes an whole letter maybe a whole word.

00:03:23: in a fraction or second.

00:03:25: It distinguishes shapes by their overall silhouette.

00:03:28: A fingertip doesn't work like that—a fingertip reads slowly locally one tiny area at time…The raised letters that was easy to recognize are laborious and confusing.

00:03:40: A capital W and a capital M, clear as anything visually are almost identical when you're feeling your way around raised bumps in the talk.

00:03:50: Reading this way was painfully slow.

00:03:51: writing was essentially impossible.

00:03:53: You couldn't reproduce raised print letters by hand at any usable speed.

00:03:58: After years of effort The school's library had accumulated fourteen books Fourteen for an entire School.

00:04:04: Louis Braille arrived At that school In eighteen nineteen.

00:04:07: he Was ten Years old.

00:04:09: Louis was born on the fourth of January, eighteen oh nine in a small village about forty kilometers east of Paris.

00:04:15: His father was The Village Sadler.

00:04:16: he made harnesses bridles leather goods for horses skilled work done with sharp tools In a workshop that was as you can probably imagine not particularly set up to be safe or curious.

00:04:27: three-year old which is what Louie was.

00:04:30: one afternoon in eighteen twelve when He picked Up an all and All Is A pointed metal tool used To punch holes And Leather.

00:04:38: Louis had watched his father use one dozens of times.

00:04:40: He wanted to try.

00:04:41: he pressed it down into a piece of leather and its slipped, And it struck him in his right eye.

00:04:46: The injury got infected In the early nineteenth century before antibiotics an eye infection Had a way of spreading.

00:04:53: by that time Louis was five.

00:04:54: both eyes have been affected.

00:04:56: He was completely blind.

00:04:57: His parents and this matters to the story refused to treat him as someone whose life was now diminished.

00:05:04: In an era when blind children were routinely written off, his father made him wooden ladders to trace with his fingers?

00:05:10: His mother taught him to navigate the village – The local priest got him into classes at the village school sitting and listening… And Louis this is a bit that keeps striking me excelled!

00:05:21: He was clearly obviously exceptionally clever.

00:05:24: he won a scholarship for the Royal Institution of Blind Youth in Paris One of the first schools of its kind in world.

00:05:31: He arrived, he found the fourteen books ,he found them frustrating and limited .He read everything in them anyway And started thinking about whether there wasn't a better way.

00:05:42: Ok this is where I have to tell you something that will disappoints you slightly.

00:05:45: Then immediately make your story more interesting.

00:05:49: You may well heard this That French military captain named Charles Barbier had invented a secret battlefield communication system for Napoleon's soldiers A code of raised dots readable by touch in total darkness, so soldiers could receive orders at night without lighting a match and giving away their position.

00:06:07: And that when the military rejected it, Babi aborted to school for the blind where young Louis encountered it.

00:06:14: It's a fantastic story, it has everything – Napoleon, secret codes, battlefield stealth…a teenage genius.

00:06:21: The problem in historians working from Barbier's actual original documents have established this fairly clearly is that the military-battlefield bit is largely a myth!

00:06:30: It seems to be invented by the mid-fifties over one hundred years after their events when writers preparing anniversary commemorations of Braille's death decided real story needed more dramatic origin.

00:06:43: The embellishment got repeated, then repeated again.

00:06:46: Now it's in most popular accounts.

00:06:48: Here is what actually happened.

00:06:49: Charles Barbier was real a former artillery officer who had left the military in seventeen ninety-two.

00:06:55: long before Napoleon's major campaigns He spent years developing experimental writing systems.

00:07:01: In eighteen fifteen he published a book with twelve different methods one of which used raised dots readable by touch.

00:07:07: His own documentation suggests he designed this primarily for blind people, not soldiers.

00:07:12: He called it point writing.

00:07:14: The name night-writing was used by others and probably stuck because it sounded intriguing.

00:07:19: Did his military background influence his thinking about communication without light?

00:07:23: Maybe possibly But the specific image of Napoleon's troops reading battle orders through dots in the dark that story from the nineteen fifties And I think is worth pausing on Because its such a good example how history gets made The real story, Barbier invented a raised dot system brought it to the school for the blind.

00:07:42: A twelve-year old encountered and improved their into something brilliant apparently wasn't dramatic enough on its own.

00:07:50: So someone added Napoleon.

00:07:52: And now Napoleon is in almost every version of this story In workshop.

00:07:56: he never entered in campaign that had nothing do with it.

00:08:00: The truth is just a boy in school looking at the system that didn't quite work and deciding to fix it.

00:08:07: Barbier's system used twelve dots, arranged two columns of six.

00:08:11: It represented phonetic sounds not individual letters but sounds.

00:08:15: This caused two serious problems.

00:08:17: Spelling was imprecise because sounds don't map cleanly onto letters And punctuation couldn't be represented at all!

00:08:24: The cells were also too tall.

00:08:25: cover with one fingertip You had drag your finger down pattern to decode which slow.

00:08:31: Louis encountered this system in eighteen twenty-one.

00:08:34: He was twelve.

00:08:36: Louis Braille was twelve when he first saw Barbier's System, he was fifteen when he had essentially solved it.

00:08:42: In three years working his spare time at a school workshop with appointed stylus and sheets of paper A child who has been blind since the age five redesigned a system that trained adult inventors and educators have been unable to crack for decades.

00:08:57: What did actually change?

00:08:59: First and most importantly, he cut the cell in half from twelve dots to six.

00:09:04: Two columns of three small enough that a single fingertip can cover the entire cell at once And feel all six positions simultaneously.

00:09:12: No dragging no movement just touch instant.

00:09:16: Six dots in two columns have three gives you sixty four possible combinations including the blank space.

00:09:22: Think about that for a second.

00:09:23: Sixty-four combinations from six dots.

00:09:26: Louis took those sixty four combinations and assigned them to every letter of the alphabet, Every number, every punctuation mark And then –and this is part still impresses me everytime I think about it– he designed musical notation too.

00:09:39: The entire written language plus music packed into space roughly the size human fingertip.

00:09:46: Second change.

00:09:47: He moved away from representing sounds and started representing actual letters, specific individual letters.

00:09:52: the way they appear in written text which meant spelling was accurate.

00:09:57: punctuation was possible.

00:09:59: you could write exactly what you meant And someone else could read exactly What he wrote?

00:10:04: He published this system In eighteen twenty nine years old And here's the detail that I think about more than almost any other detail in this whole podcast.

00:10:15: The tool he used to punch the dots into paper was a pointed metal instrument called a stylus, almost identical in form to an awl .The instruments of his blindness and the instruments for life work were –in their basic physical form–the same object!

00:10:29: He didn't choose a stylas for poetic reasons —he chose it because they had practical tools available— but the fact remains…this thing took him sight when he was three and the thing he used to give the world a new way of reading were the same shape in his hand.

00:10:43: History occasionally does this, produces details so perfectly constructed that you'd cut it from novel for being too on-the-nose And then….

00:10:51: It turns out to be true.

00:10:52: You might reasonably expect once an fifteen year old had invented their writing system that genuinely worked faster more accurate more elegant than anything existed before institutions would immediately adopt it.

00:11:05: They didn't.

00:11:07: The Royal Institution, where Louis both studied and later taught actively suppressed his system for years.

00:11:13: A new director came in who had decided that blind students should learn to read using embossed standard print letters – the slow laborious frustrating Howie System because it was what sighted people used.

00:11:26: The institution's philosophy was integration.

00:11:28: Blind people should use these same tools as sighted peoples not develop their own separate systems.

00:11:35: Braille was removed from the official curriculum.

00:11:37: Students who wanted to keep using it had to practice in secret, In their own time!

00:11:42: In a school where Louis Braille WAS A TEACHER his own invention was banned From The Classroom.

00:11:47: He watched this happen.

00:11:48: he kept teaching and advocating quietly but didn't give up.

00:11:52: There is a broader argument underneath the institutional decision And its worth understanding because It wasn't entirely without logic.

00:11:59: Some sighted educators genuinely believe that if blind people develop their own independent literacy system, one sighted person couldn't read.

00:12:07: it would isolate them further.

00:12:09: That the goal should be bringing blind people into sighted culture not helping them build a parallel one.

00:12:15: The problem with this argument and its significant is in practice meant asking blind to keep using systems which didn't work well for the comfort of sighted.

00:12:26: The needs of the people, that institution was supposed to serve were being subordinated To the preferences Of the People running it.

00:12:33: Louis Bael died in January.

00:12:35: in eighteen fifty-two he Was forty three years old.

00:12:37: He had tuberculosis which have been worsening for Years?

00:12:41: He died knowing his system worked Knowing His students used It and loved it knowing the school he Had given his life too had refused to officially adopted.

00:12:49: him missed the official adoption by two years.

00:12:51: In eighteen fifty-four, the Royal Institution formally adopted Braille.

00:12:55: His former students now teachers themselves have pushed for it in months after his death.

00:13:01: By late nineteenth century braille had spread across Europe then to the Americas and Asia & Africa.

00:13:07: Today It exists in virtually every written language on earth.

00:13:10: There is braille notation from mathematics For music.

00:13:14: Louis himself developed a musical system And its still used by blind musicians.

00:13:19: today There are braille menus in restaurants, Braille buttons and lifts.

00:13:23: Braille signage in public spaces on every continent.

00:13:26: It is one of the most widely distributed writing systems in human history And it has essentially unchanged from what a fifteen-year old boy worked out In Paris workshop in the eighteen twenties.

00:13:37: I want to say one more thing about why Braille worked when everything before it hadn't because i think its'the most interesting part Of whole story.

00:13:48: The embossed letter system that came before Braille wasn't just hard to use, it was a visual system forced into tactile medium.

00:14:04: Braille didn't adapt anything, he started from scratch.

00:14:07: He designed a system specifically for how a fingertip actually works – How it moves?

00:14:13: How it processes information What size of cell It can cover instantly?

00:14:18: How quickly it can distinguish between different dot patterns?

00:14:25: And he could do that, this is the thing.

00:14:27: Because he had never seen a printed letter.

00:14:29: He has no visual bias No assumption baked in from childhood That reading looks a certain way.

00:14:34: He only knew what reading felt like and turned out to be exactly The knowledge needed To do it right.

00:14:41: Experienced Braille readers can read at speeds Comparable decided people Reading print.

00:14:46: Not as remarkable exception As ordinary outcome of learning A system designed correctly For its medium.

00:14:53: From beginning The person best place to solve this problem was the person who had been living inside it since the age of five.

00:15:00: Not because suffering is good, not because adversity always produces insight but he understood from direct experience rather than imagination exactly what that problem felt like in the inside and understanding turned out to be irreplaceable.

00:15:14: Six dots, sixty-four combinations every written language on earth.

00:15:18: That's what three years a stylist can do.

00:15:22: So next time you pass a lift and your finger brushes over small panel of raised dots or you notice dots along the edge of menu in restaurant, Or see more rectangular pattern on sign and realize it's saying something that most people walking past can't read.

00:15:36: Just take a second!

00:15:38: That is a fifteen year old boy in workshop in eighteen twenties Paris refusing to accept that available answer was good enough.

00:15:45: That system practice in secret by students who knew worked passed from hand-to-hand quite literally until the world finally caught up.

00:15:53: That's six dots, sixty four combinations every written language on earth and it almost didn't exist.

00:15:58: which might be the most important thing about history is an only in museums sometimes its right under your fingertips And you've been passing without noticing If this made you think of something that you have moved through without seeing.

00:16:12: thats always.

00:16:13: what I'm here for The Hidden Life Of Things Is On Spotify Apple Podcasts Wherever You Listen.

00:16:19: If you want more Bite Size History podcast every week, then follow this channel.

00:16:24: And if you know someone who would love a story about a teenager who quietly changed the world.

00:16:29: send us to them and here's your preview for next time.

00:16:33: it sits on your wrist right now or in You glance at it dozens of times a day without thinking, but for most human history wearing a timepiece on your body was considered something only women did.

00:16:46: A delicate piece of jewelry not serious instruments.

00:16:49: It took a war to change that –a war so brutal and precisely coordinated So dependent everyone doing the right thing in exactly second.

00:16:58: That men who fought decided having this time struck tourist wasn't feminine at all.

00:17:04: It's survival.

00:17:06: What changed on those battlefields and why that change ended up at every risk is the story we're telling next time.

00:17:14: Stay curious, I'm Alexandra & i'll talk to you next week.