Louis Braille
Louis Braille (1809-52), French teacher of the blind and inventor of the Braille alphabet. Braille blinded himself with a knife at the age of three while cutting a piece of leather. Despite his handicap he became a proficient musician and in 1819 went to Paris, where he attended the National Institute for Blind Youth. From 1828 he taught there and devised a method of representing letters by groups of dots embossed in card-board, which could be read with the fingers. Braille’s system has since been applied to non-Roman scripts and to music and mathematics.
