It's January 4th, World Braille Day. On this auspicious day in 1809, a child named Louis Braille was born in 🇫🇷 Coupvray, France. Young Louis was 👨🏼🦯 blinded at the age of three by an accident in his father's harness-making shop. Despite his disability, Braille excelled in his education.
While he was a student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, he began developing the 📚 reading system for the blind that he'd eventually become world-famous for. Braille's creation involved a code he invented himself and used cells that contained up to six dots, making it possible for a 👆🏽 fingertip to feel an entire cell with just one touch and move quickly to the next cell.
Braille spent the rest of his life teaching at the institute and perfecting his system, but unfortunately didn't live long enough to see it put into use. Braille suffered from a respiratory illness (probably tuberculosis) most of his adult life and finally succumbed to the disease in 1852 at the age of 43.
Two years later, thanks to the unrelenting insistence of his students, the Royal Institute for Blind Youth finally officially adopted Braille's system. Its use quickly spread throughout the French-speaking world, but was slow to catch on elsewhere. After his introduction to the system at the first European Conference of Teachers of the Blind in 1873, 🇬🇧 Britain's Dr. Thomas Rhodes Armitage championed Braille's invention, and its use quickly spread over most of the rest of the planet. The 🇺🇸 US was slowest to see the light. It didn't adopt the system until 1916.
In November 2018, the 🇺🇳 United Nations proclaimed that from now on, World Braille Day would be celebrated as an international day every January 4th to show appreciation for Louis Braille and to promote "awareness of the importance of his creation as a means of communication in the full realization of the human rights for blind and visually impaired people." Of course, the UN chose January 4th because it's Braille's birthday. ☮️ R.I.P., Louis… Jamiese of Pixoplanet
