Louis Braille inventor of raised-dot writing for the blind, got his idea from a secret communications system devised for military purposes by a French army officer, Nicholas-Marie-Charles Barbier de La Serre.

Barbier was born 18 May 1767 at Valenciennes, in the north of France. At 15 he was admitted to a military school under a provision allowing impoverished young noblemen to attend. The school was perhaps that at Brienne, where he would have been for a year a fellow student of Napoleon Bonaparte. He graduated as an artillery officer (as did Napoleon). When the French Revolution broke out, he immigrated to the United States, working as a surveyor and living with Indians until his return to France under Napoleon’s empire.

He became interested in fast, secret writing and, in 1808, published a brochure entitled Tableau d’expediographie (“Table of speedwriting”) and, in 1809, his Principes d’expeditive francaise pour ecrire aussi vite que la parole (“Principles of French Speediness for Writing as Fast as Speech”). The latter described a process that he called “impressed writing to replace the pen or pencil and to execute several copies at a time without tracing characters.” Barbier was describing a writing that could be felt, perhaps recalling times when such a capability would have been useful for officers in the field to draft outgoing messages in the dark and perhaps to “read” incoming ones with their fingers.

Barbier refined his idea when he proposed setting out the 25 letters of the French alphabet in a 5×5 Polybius square and later what he considered as the 36 sounds of French (e.g., a, i, ch, e, ieu) in a 6×6 square. Each letter or sound could thus be replaced by a pair of numbers. He recognized that by changing the pattern of letters or sounds in the square, he would have a system of secret writing useful for soldiers or diplomats. As a mere monoalphabetic substitution, it was not very secure: perhaps he recognized this, for he did not insist on it further. Instead, he combined his ideas of cryptography and impressed writing in a machine that indented the numbers onto paper.

In 1819, he displayed this device at an exposition in a Museum of Products of Industry temporarily installed in the court of the Louvre. A report by three scientists to the Academy of Sciences the following year discussed two systems used apparently by two models of the machine to die-stamp the numbers representing the lines and columns of the square. In one of them, three raised dots formed right or obtuse angles. In the other, raised dots were ranged on an axis to facilitate determining them. All of this was for the military; none was for the blind. But, at the same exhibition, students of the Royal Institution for Blind Children showed how they could read from books – huge bound volumes – printed with ordinary letters in high relief by running their fingers over the words. Barbier perhaps witnessed the difficulty they had in figuring out the letters. By 1821, an article in the Mercure Technologique that discussed the military and diplomatic advantages of Barbier’s system also mentioned that the Royal Institution for Blind Children had adopted it for instruction, and in 1822 an entire article dealt with the use of the system for the blind.

This system utilized two parallel columns of six raised points each. The number of points in the left-hand column indicated the line of the square table of sounds, the number in the right hand column the position within that line of the designated sound. Methods were given to punch the points into the paper. Braille, a compatriot of Barbier’s but 42 years younger, modified this system into an alphabet utilizing an array of 2×3 locations, in one or more of which dots are raised to indicate letters. Thus to represent a, the dot in the left column at the top is punched out, the other seven positions being left unpunched, or level; for o, the first and third dots in the left column and the second dot in the right column are raised. The 26 letters are supplemented by a sign for capital letters and a sign for numerals, which are then represented by the letters from a to j.

Braille, himself blind, was thus both honest and generous when he said of Barbier in 1829 that “it is to his method that we owe the first idea of our own.”

This material is adopted from Pierre Henri, La Vie et l’Oeuvre de Louis Braille, Inventeur de l’Alphabet des Aveugles (1809-1852) Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952) chapter III,

“L a Genese du systeme Braille.”

Reprinted from Cryptologia By: David Kahn

Editor’s note: David Kahn was the “Residential Historian” at The National Security Agency

Source: CRYPTOLOG, Winter 2005: