Susie Battersby, age 10, of St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, for her question:
WHO INVENTED BRAILLE?
Andy's own reference library, the World Book Encyclopedia, was put into a Braille edition in 1961 by the nonprofit American Printing House for the Blind. It was the largest undertaking in the history of Braille and the first attempt to translate an encyclopedia into Braille. The edition consists of 145 volumes. It weighs 700 pounds and fills 43 feet of shelf space.
Braille is a code of raised dots on paper that can be read by touch. The system of writing was invented in 1824 by a 15 year old blind French student named Louis Braille.
Three years after he was born, Louis Braille was blinded in an accident. At the age of 10 he was put into the National Institute for the Blind in Paris where he was an excellent student, specializing in science and music.
The idea for the raised dot system developed by Braille came from a dot and dash code punched on cardboard that Capt. Charles Barbier had used to send messages to his soldiers at night. Braille's cell was three dots high and two dots wide. A total of 63 combinations could be formed within this six dot formation.
In 1829 Braille published his dot system which included the alphabet, punctuation marks, numerals and later a system for writing music. The code wasn't accepted at first, but later gained universal acceptance and official approval.
A blind person can read Braille by running his fingers along the dots. A Braillewriter, a six key machine, can be used for writing the raised dots or the work can be done with a stylus on a pocket size metal or plastic slate.
Books published in Braille are made from metal plates, and there is a great demand for them in all parts of the world. In a Braille book, characters are stamped on both sides of the paper by a method called interpointing. Dots on one side of the page do not interfere with those on the other.
In the early 1960s some publishers began using computers to speed up the production of Braille books. A computer can be used to change regular punched cards that have been prepared by a typist into cards punched with a Braille code. A machine then automatically produces metal plates from the Braille¬coded cards.
Another new item in Braille books uses a vacuum Braille former which duplicates hand transcribed Braille pages on plastic sheets which are then bound into volumes.
The Braille alphabet starts by using 10 combinations of the top four dots in a cell. The same 10 characters, when preceded by a special number sign, are also used to express the numbers from 1 to zero. Special combinations of dots are used for such words as "and, " ''for)'' "of, " "the" and ''with."