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Barbier's system was not intended as a tool for educating blind
children or for allowing blind people to communicate effectively.
Barbier was an engineer in the French army. His motivation was
to create a method of sending secret messages that could be read
without light. Barbier did, however, develop an interest in the
use of his system with the blind, and in 1820 he presented his
method to the Institute for the Blind in Paris. One of Barbier's
students at the Institute was Louis Braille.
Louis Braille was blinded at the age of three as a result of an
accident with his father's knives, who was a harness maker in a
small town near Paris. His father worked to have him educated at
a local school, and created letters by hammering upholstery nails
into a wooden board. At the age of ten, Louis was enrolled in
the Institute for the Blind in Paris, where he encountered
Barbier. Braille remained at the school his entire life, serving
as a teacher for more that twenty years. Braille modified
Barbier's code by reducing the twelve dot cell to six dots, two
columns of three dots. Louis Braille also created a system of
notating music, since he himself was a musician. Braille's
system of writing was formally instituted at the school in 1854,
and was quickly adapted to other languages. Braille, to his
credit, throughout his life argued that credit for the invention
of raised dots should go to Barbier, but the system perfected by
Louis Braille now bears his name. As a semantics note, you will
often see the term "Braille" with a capital letter, used to
signify all of the systems that use this methodology, including
literary braille, music, mathematics, and other technical
notational systems.
The braille notation did not arrive in the United States until
around 1860, when it was adopted for use at the Missouri School
for the Blind in St. Louis. However, a number of others were
still exploring raised letters. In Boston, Samuel Gridley Howe
of the Perkins School for the Blind had developed the Boston Line
Type, which was a modification of regular letters using slanted
lines. Howe's method was used in the United States for more than
50 years. In Philadelphia, Julius Freidlander had also developed
an embossed letter system for use at the Pennsylvania Institute
for the Blind.
Around the same time, William Bell Wait of the New York Institute
for the Blind modified French braille by trying to create braille
cell symbols that used the least number of dots for the most
frequently used letters. One of the criticisms of Louis
Braille's code was that the easiest to read braille cells did not
correspond to the most frequently occurring letters. Wait's
system, known as New York Point, also allowed for capitalization
by adding specific dots to form capital letters. Wait's system
was presented and recommended for use in American schools in 1871
at a meeting of the American Association of Instructors of the
Blind.
Around the same time, Michael Anagnos at the Perkins Institution
worked with a blind piano tuner, Joel Smith, to modify French
braille by retaining the original twelve letters and then re-designing the others to reflect frequency of occurrence. In
addition, a dot prefix was used for the first time to enable
capitalization. The system developed was known as Modified, or
American, braille.
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