Out of Darkness by Russell Freedman

Author:Russell Freedman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The Braille Cell

Visions of dots and more dots danced in Louis’s head. He wanted to simplify Captain Barbier’s system so that each dotted symbol could be “read” with a quick touch of the finger.

His days were filled with classes and school activities, so he experimented whenever he could find the time—between classes, on weekends, at night in the dormitory. When everyone else had gone to bed, and the only sound was the breathing of his sleeping classmates, he would take out his stylus and paper and begin to juggle dots. Often, he would doze off himself, his head nodding, the stylus grasped in his hand as though he wanted to keep on working in his sleep.

On some nights, he lost all track of time. He would be sitting on the edge of his bed, punching dots, when the rumbling of wagons on the cobblestones outside told him that morning had come.

After staying up all night, he fell asleep in class. And like several other students, he developed a hacking cough. Winter coughs were common at the Institute. The old school building always felt damp and cold.

Louis’s mother worried about him when he came home for vacation. He looked so pale and gaunt. She wanted to fatten him up, and she insisted that he go to bed early. Monique would climb the stairs to the garret bedroom, tuck Louis in, and kiss him good-night, as though he were still a little boy.

A few weeks of fresh country air did wonders. Louis’s cough vanished. He felt revived. On fine mornings, he would walk down the road with his cane, carrying a stylus, writing board, and paper in his knapsack. He would sit on a grassy slope, basking in the sun and working patiently as he punched dots into paper. People would pass by and call out, “Hello there, Louis! Still making pinpricks?” They weren’t sure what he was trying to do, but whatever it was, he was obviously lost in thought.

Gradually, Louis managed to simplify Captain Barbier’s system, but he wasn’t satisfied. The dotted symbols he came up with were never simple enough. Sometimes he shouted in frustration and ripped the paper he was working on to shreds.

Then an idea came to him—an idea for an entirely different approach. It seemed so obvious! Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

Captain Barbier’s symbols were based on sounds—that was the problem! There were so many sounds in the French language. With sonography, a dozen dots or more might be needed to represent one syllable, as many as a hundred dots for a single word.

Instead of sounds, suppose the dot-and-dash symbols represented letters of the alphabet! The alphabet would be so much easier to work with.

Of course, Louis could not simply have one dot stand for a, two dots for b, and so on. That way, a blind reader would have to count twenty-six dots to read the letter z. Additional dots would be needed for numbers and punctuation marks.

But now that he had changed his thinking, Louis made real progress.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.