The Braille alphabet, read today by blind people in almost every country on Earth, was invented in 1824 by a fifteen-year-old French student who had been blind since the age of three — arranging six raised dots in a pattern small enough to sit under a single fingertip, based on a code originally developed for the French army

The most widely-used tactile writing system in human history was invented by a French teenager working on his own at night with the same kind of leather-punching awl that had blinded him when he was three years old. The educational institution that made Louis Braille’s invention possible was, in essential respects, unique in the world [...] The post The Braille alphabet, read today by blind people in almost every country on Earth, was invented in 1824 by a fifteen-year-old French student who had