Braille

French educator and inventor Louis Braille invented a system of reading and writing for the blind in 1824. How did he develop it? How has it changed the world? Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore in this episode of Invention. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp and
I'm Joe McCormick and Robert. You know what, I am
excited today because I feel like this episode of Invention
is going to be something that I haven't I haven't
fully dealt with yet, which is an invention that I
can't really find a bad angle on. But I feel
like today we're gonna be talking about an invention that

(00:29):
I think is just pretty great. Yeah, we're talking about Brail.
Brail the writing system based on tactile sensations for people
who are blind or otherwise visually impaired. So it's a
writing system, yeah, it's and it's It is hard to
imagine Brail being used for evil, except in the sense
that all writing systems could be used for evil. So

(00:51):
I guess you could. Somebody could write something mean or
you know, outright dangerous in Brail in the same way
the one could do that in any full of written communication. Yes,
but I would say as a modification and expansion of
an existing writing system, and of course writing comes with
all that writing can do, I'd say it's just a
good thing to have. Yeah, And they didn't start the

(01:13):
fire right there, it's a continuation of existing written language technology.
So whatever was already bad or dangerous in the written
word was already there, and and this is not necessarily
adding anything new to it in that regard. So written
language is something that we might not often think about

(01:34):
as an invention, but I think it's actually one of
the most important inventions to consider. Oh yeah, we've talked
about this a good bit on stuff to blow your
mind in the past. But but what he is language
but the power to take words and thoughts and fix
them in place, to record them and create complex forms
out of their structure. And then one can simply come along,
read the words and hear those words in your mind,

(01:58):
think those thoughts for yourself. So when when it's it's
crazy to think about this is sort of deconstructed and
realize that when we read the words of a long
dead thinker, we are reading we are loading their thoughts
into our mind and thinking with their thoughts. You're going
into the matrix, you're uploading their thoughts. I mean, maybe
not exactly, because you're probably reading across the translation gap

(02:19):
and there's something like that, but I mean reading the
words written by another person. I feel like is is
about as close as you can get to just mind,
you know, mind reading. Yeah. I was thinking about this
too with translation the other day, Like, you know what,
I wonder, what are what are the oldest words that
I've read that I can actually you know, get the

(02:40):
gist out of. It's not too archaic and it's a formation. Um,
I mean probably, I mean certainly probably something in Old
English passages and Bayowolf you can kind of get the
sense of. But those are cases where even though there's
you know, maybe a little distortion, uh, you know, a
little static from all those century is of linguistic shift,

(03:02):
but but you're you're still feeling those thoughts, you're still
thinking those thoughts from another time. Writing is the time
machine exactly. Now. While spoken languages auditory, obviously, written language
is a visual system, and for the blind or visually impaired,
written language is going to be rather lacking obviously. Yeah. Yeah,
just strokes on a page are going to be difficult,

(03:26):
if not impossible, to read. And I would say, because
education is so often tied up in literacy throughout much
of human history and lots of cultures, I think this
has led to a kind of unfair and dismissive under
consideration of the role of the education of the blind,
because it's like, well, they can't read the written texts
we have, so what, you know, what can we really

(03:47):
teach them? Yeah, it wasn't until seventeen eighty four that
school for the blind was established in France and then
the concept spread throughout Europe. But but prior to that,
I mean, certainly, if you go back to the ancient
world and prehistoric times you had this is sort of
the varying levels of of importance or or attention paid

(04:09):
to the blind or visually impaired individuals, especially individuals who
who were born visually impaired or without the ability to see.
You go back to prehistoric civil civilizations and they might
have had a practice of disposing of such individuals um likewise,
throughout you know, the ancient world, you see sort of

(04:31):
varying treatment. Right, there are times where a blind individual
is elevated, that is celebrated. Plenty of other blind or
visual impaired individuals who are just simply lost to history.
But you know, you think about say Homer, uh the
you know, the famous Greek storyteller. Whether or not this

(04:52):
was an actual historic individual, many of the the accounts
say that that that he was blind, and so on
one hand, if this was an actual blind storyteller, there
you know there's a there's a lot to be inferred
from that. But but then at the same time, there
there is this tendency in human history to take individuals

(05:14):
that that are notable in some sort of disfigurement or
a difference in ability, or even something like twins, and
what they end up being is not not really a
treatment of individuals with those conditions, but symbols for other
people to interpret. It's like when you look at movies
about twins or stories about twins, it's very often something

(05:38):
created by uh Singleton's by individuals who do not have
a twin, who are finding something in it in this
situation to speak to their own identity, to be a metaphor. Yeah,
and I think that's exactly correct. I mean, you see
characters in you brought up Homer, but I think about
like the legendary character of Tyreseius, the blind prophet, which
I think is very often deployed by cited people as

(06:01):
sort of like a metaphor or a symbol or something
like that. Right, So you see this trend without going
just really deep into sort of the history of blindness
in human societies. But but very often the blind were
treated as metaphors as and and and they certainly lacked
any kind of like large scale, you know, communal experience,

(06:26):
Like the blind were not able to come together across
cultures and do things like develop their own system of
written language. And certainly you didn't have any real efforts
to make the cited world more accessible to sightless individuals.
You know, an individual might well be able to depend
on a family or a subordinate for aid in reading.
And as early as Greek and Roman times, some individuals

(06:47):
had access to lenses to aid them in reading. And
of course we'll have to come back into a future
episode of invention on that. But while the written word
might be tactile in some cases due to the way
that it's carved in stone or the way that it's
you know, created using a stylus and wax, this was
not the primary desired effect of those systems. Yeah, and

(07:08):
now I mean, now that we live in a modern
world where we are aware of the concept of brail,
you might not understand its history or exactly how it
was invented or how it works. Hopefully you will know
something about that at the end of this episode, but
you're aware of the fact that it exists before that.
It's it's hard to imagine that there would not be
some kind of widespread reading system within languages for people

(07:29):
who are blind or visually impaired. But throughout history that
just generally was the case. But we should also say
that Brail as it's known today was not the first
system of tactually encoding written language for the blind. That's right.
For instance, there was an English system created by Dr
William Moon, invented in eighteen forty five, moon Type, which

(07:51):
sounds wonderfully Elvin, uh, you know, like like some sort
of Elvin script that comes to life in the moonlight
or something. But it was just named because that was
a name. But it was basically a font type that
is embossed and can be felt. And this wasn't even
the first such type. There was. Valentine we Uh presented

(08:11):
a version of this in the seventeen eighties. And again
the simple concept here is UH existing fonts like aes
B ces ds that you can that you can trace
with your fingers, that you can touch and identify. Oh,
that's an a this is a B, this is the c. Etcetera. Yeah,
Hui system consisted of these embossed letters, and it was

(08:32):
in fact somewhat useful for blind students like Louis Braille,
who we will talk about in this episode as the
inventor of Braille, learned to read with Hoi's system before
he invented Braille based on another system we'll talk about
in a bit, but it was the system of embossed letters,
where like a normal letter, as you're saying, would be
pressed through on a damp piece of paper and it

(08:53):
would leave a print there that you could feel with
your hand. But it had these real limitations, like to
hold to this size of type, the books of print
had to be huge and monstrously heavy, like I've seen
estimates of an average of four point five kims about
ten pounds per book, which is too heavy to hold
and carry around in a practical way, especially for a

(09:15):
child who's learning to read. But beyond that, there's just
a reality that embossed alphabetic letters are hard to read
by touch. And this is something that might not be
obvious to cited readers. You just like look at them
and say, well, they look different to me. I can
tell the difference, but reading with your fingers is a
different type of sensation activity than reading with your eyes is.

(09:39):
And and it just turned out that for many blind
students there was a lot of ambiguity in the shapes
of letters. You could be trying to read across the line.
And number one, it wasn't very fast because the letters
were big and you have to sort of like feel
around on each one. You couldn't just run your finger
across the line. But then beyond that, there's ambiguity between letters,
like a C might feel a lot like a G

(10:01):
and all that, and it would take you a minute
to figure out the difference. And this made reading slow
and laborious. I feel like there's something probably revealing in
this this journey thus far. You know, we've we've talked
about the roles or the interpretations of of of blind
and vision impaired individuals throughout history, and and here with
these these systems, they do seem like a sided world

(10:24):
first technology. Absolutely, yeah, it's blind or vision impaired individuals
who will make some of the the key breakthroughs here.
That's absolutely right. And at the same time, I don't
want to downplay, uh, like who's contribution, like this was
a real invention, this idea of the embost letters. It
was better than nothing. And I think it's clear that

(10:45):
who he was well meaning. Oh yeah, because it is
easy to take for granted and speaking here as a
sided individual, to take for granted the degree to which
we rely on site and and and and use that
as our key means of interpreting the world, but also
not to realize how much you're not getting about other

(11:06):
people's experiences, like if you haven't experienced it yourself. Yeah,
this is This is certainly an area as we continue
on in the episode, I imagine we have some listeners
out there who who are blind or vision impaired in
one way, shape or another. We would love to hear
your feedback on on Brail on the experiences we're discussing

(11:26):
in this episode totally. And one more thing I just
realized about we should mention about the Hui system is uh.
I hope I'm saying his name right. It's I was
trying to look up how to pronounce this one. It's
h a u y and I could not find I
think it's Hui. That's my best guess. So if you're
a French speaker out there, and you're grimacing every time
we do this. This won't be the last time in
the episode encounter difficult French names. All apologies, but yeah,

(11:51):
So another thing about his system is that it's probably
also easier to use this system if you are an
adult who is used to reading printed letters and then
lost their site later on in life, and you can
feel around on those letters. Then if you're a child
who has who has never learned to read printed letters,
and you could perhaps be learning a tactle system that's

(12:12):
much easier to pick up from the beginning. But we'll
come back to this, says I think we should. We
should move now to talk about something called night writing.
Are you ready for night writing? Yeah? It sounds great.
It sounds like like a ninet eighties horror film that
I could really get into, like night Gallery, Night Gallery
with a little like night gallery meets automatic writing meets uh,
you know, a little night cheese in there. Well, I

(12:34):
guess it also, Yeah, working on my night Cheese. I
just know someday we're gonna get sued because we do
a version of Working on My Night moves, and we're
not gonna We're not gonna remember that edited out better.
This is night writing. So you might have heard or
remember from history classes that the design and tactics of
mobile artillery were important to the success of Napoleon's military

(12:57):
campaigns in the early nineteenth century. And Napoleon himself had
been an artillery officer when he was coming up through
the ranks. And another artillery officer in Napoleon's army would
end up playing an important role in the creation of
the modern Brail writing system, and this man was Nicholas
Marie Charles Barbier de Lasayer, often shortened to just Charles

(13:18):
Charles or Charles Barbier. And one good source I found
that included stuff about the life of Charles Barbier was
a book called Louis Braile A Touch of Genius by C.
Michael Mallore from National Braille Press in two thousand six.
So Barbier was born on May eighteen, seventeen sixty seven,
and he was born into an aristocratic family, not like

(13:40):
galactic scale big wigs, but like minor big wigs, medium wigs,
and he went to a military school to become an
army officer, but then the French Revolution broke out and
he being a son of a minor aristocratic family, he
fled to America and worked there for several years as
a surveyor, and while in the United States, supposedly Barbiea

(14:01):
became very interested in the writing systems that were being
used by Native American tribes to to create codes for
their languages, and barbie A at one point wrote, quote,
of all the inventions honoring the human spirit, writing has
contributed most to its development and progress. So this guy
is a fan of the printed word. But barbie A

(14:22):
later returned to France and served in the army, and
from his interest in the creation of writing systems which
she had sort of gained while he was in the
United States, Barbiea developed an idea for a code that
could be useful in wartime, and this code was called
night writing. Now, imagine you're outdoing maneuvers under the cover

(14:43):
of darkness. Maybe you want to put some mobile artillery
in place without the enemy noticing what you're doing in
the middle of the night. Now, you want to be
able to send a written message from one group or
station to the to another. And normally, if you send
a written message during night maneuvers, the person receiving the
message would have to light a torch or a lantern

(15:03):
in order to read it, but that might give away
your position to the enemy if you suddenly light a
fire in the middle of a dark battlefield and then
maybe some shells come raining down on you. So Barbie's
idea was to use a system of holes punched into
a piece of cardboard which could be read in total
darkness because you could feel the symbols of the message
with your fingers, allowing you to read it without a

(15:26):
light and without giving away your position to the enemy.
So Barbie has got this great idea. He's like, I'm
going to change how how night moves are done. Um,
he's working on his night moves and he presents this
this idea of night riding to the military leadership. But
apparently they're just not impressed. And I don't honestly know
the reason why they rejected his idea, But if I

(15:47):
had to guess, I would think one obstacle would be
that this code would take time and effort for people
to learn, and wouldn't necessarily be worth trying to make
everybody learn when you also had the option of just
transmitting message is by whisper in the dark. You could
send a human messenger to tell somebody something and they
could whisper it in their ear. That probably wouldn't give

(16:07):
much away, right, And then it also stands to reason
that in some cases you would be able to deploy
some sort of light and do so in a way
that would not necessarily give away your position. And we
wouldn't require you to have learned to call a code
and utilize some sort of a punch language, maybe under
a blanket or something like. It's it's a it's an

(16:29):
eloquent solution for a problem that maybe did not call
for so eloquent a solution. That's possible. But even though
he got rejected owned by the way, Robert, I've included
a picture of Barbie a here, who, for some reason
just really kind of reminds me of the way Xander
Berkeley looks in Terminator to wait, remind me of which
character Xander Berkeley was. He's John Connor's foster dad. You

(16:52):
remember him. He's drinking the milk carton. Oh, yes, vaguely. Yes.
The two one thousand gets him, Yeah, two one tho
gets most people in that movie. Maybe it's a spurious comparison,
I see it, But Anyway, Barbie was not finished with
the idea of night writing, even though it got rejected
by the military. Um. While I would say there are
some pretty obvious alternatives to night writing, when it comes

(17:14):
to transmitting short messages on a dark and battlefield, it
becomes a lot harder to come up with ways of
like reading longer messages, like say, entire books in the dark,
And so by eighteen fifteen, Barbier had developed another idea.
His idea was that the night writing system would be
useful to the blind, especially as written by Barbie and

(17:37):
quoted in Melore's book, quote to those born blind who
are deprived of the means of ever being able to
read our books or our writing. And besides this meeting
with the greatest difficulties in correctly tracing the outlines of letters.
So he he knew something about this problem, like the
idea that uh blind people trying to read with with
embossed letters of a normal alphabetics ripped faced problems like it.

(18:02):
It just wasn't as easy as cited people thought it
should be to feel a letter with your fingers and
instantly know what it is certainly, and if you're doubtful
of this the next time you go to say, a cemetery,
or you're around some sort of you know, statue that
you are permitted to touch and paw at um. Try
it out and see how fast you can get. You
see if you can hit, how much you can read.

(18:23):
And it turns out Barbie was really onto something here.
He created what turned out to be a very important
precursor to the later system of Braille, though he is
not known as its inventor. That title, of course goes
to its namesake, Uh, the namesake of the writing system,
Louis Braille. So I think maybe we should take a
quick break and then we'll come back to meet Louis Braille. Alright,

(18:48):
we're back, So let's talk about Louis Braille. We haveved
eighteen o nine through eighteen fifty two. So he was
he was a frenchman. Um would later grow to be
a French educator. But as a as a child, at
the mere age of three, uh, he was he was blinded.
So what happened is his father was a harness maker,

(19:08):
and he'd been playing with tools in his father's shop
and a tool slipped in his hand and injured his
right eye. Yeah, so this was in the commune of
Kubra and his father, Like you said, it's like, I
think he made a saddles and stuff and harnesses. And
so if you're a harness maker, saddle maker, you have
to use a sharp tool called an owl to punch

(19:31):
holes in tough leather. And apparently young Louis was trying
to punch a hole in leather with the awl when
he accidentally slipped and he stabbed himself in the right eye.
And uh, I've read that the remedy prescribed by a
local healer was an infusion of something called lily water.
I was looking to try to figure out what this is.
I couldn't find a lot of other stuff about it,
but I assume that might be I don't know, water

(19:53):
that has been soaked with lilies or something. But anyway,
it's possible this may have made the risk of infection
even were the stabed. I of course became infected and
then it got worse. Yeah. What resulted was something known
as symp sympathetic ophthalmia, which is an infection of both
eyes following trauma to a single eye, and this ultimately

(20:13):
resulted in total blindness. His eyes deteriorated over time and
he was totally blind by five. And this is particularly
devastating when you think about the age at which most
of us begin to acquire language, written language, you know,
to to be robbed of your your your visual faculties
at age between the ages of three and five, that's

(20:34):
that's devastating. Yeah. And of course this, uh, this led
to Braile's parents trying to get him enrolled in a
in an institute or or a school for blind children.
And he eventually was. Yeah, and as we mentioned earlier,
you know, he was he was lucky enough to have
been born in the right time, in the right place
to have access to one of these, uh, one of

(20:55):
the really the earliest school for the blind, and it
was at this this instant, the National Institute or the
Royal Institute for Blind Children in Paris, where I think
it went through some some different leadership. Um he uh.
He first encountered the night writing system of Charles Barbier,
though this, uh, this wouldn't happen until later. Barbier actually

(21:16):
approached the institute multiple times with his invention, and the
first time was in eighteen twenty. And so I guess
we should back up for a second. I don't know
how much you came across this, But in a lot
of the biographical writing about Louis Braille there tends to
be a kind of villain of the story by the
name of Sebastian Galie. Well, that's a great villain's name,
I guess, so I again, That's what I'm not sure

(21:38):
I'm saying, right? Is g U I L L I
E Gali? I think? And Gilly was head of the
institute when Braille was first enrolled there as a child,
and at that time conditions at the institute were in
many ways just pretty awful, like the building was described
as damp and poorly ventilated, there was dirty drinking water
with few amenities, and Gilly apparently had a very prejudiced

(22:01):
and condescending view toward the blind children that he was
supposed to educate. As quoted in Millard's book. Gilly wrote
in eighteen eighteen that he believed quote it has been
clearly shown that the blind are not like other people,
susceptible to being restrained by external demonstrations. The blind appreciate
things only by extremes and can understand justice only by

(22:22):
its effects. A paternal and just management has thus replaced
the flexible and weak regime that has for so long
prevented good from being done. All right, so that well,
that sounds that sounds horrible, and and it and it continues,
you know, a pre existing trend of treating the disabled
as as something less than than human in some cases,

(22:43):
or at least you know, as a as a secondary class. Yes, absolutely,
and and this did appear to be Gilly's view. So
he enacted harsh punishments on the children, including putting them
on a diet of dry bread and water, with physical
beatings or whippings, confinement in some extreme cases, even chaining
children to a post. Uh And many of the children

(23:04):
in the school when when new leadership came to power,
they were later found to be malnourished and in poor health.
There's an extremely hard to read an egregious case where
Gale actually performed medical experiments on his blind students. Uh So.
There was one case where he took fluid from the
eyes of children suffering from a form of LaFaro blinaria,

(23:25):
which is an eye infection resulting in discharge from the eyes,
and he put it into the eyes of four blind
children under his care at the school in order to
test how it was transmitted, and his reasoning was that
because they were already blind, they would not be risk
of them losing their sight from the infection. Uh, though
the records of the experiment indicate that the infection was
extremely painful to the Children's a horrible story. But day

(23:48):
to day at the school, the students were taught to
do things like like weaving and tactle manual tasks, uh,
weaving straw and rush mats and doing other kinds of
jobs like that. But they also had opportunities to like
learn and perform music, which Braile actually excelled at. He
was said to be an extremely talented musician. So this
is the guy who was in charge when Barbier first

(24:09):
brought his night writing to the school. Yeah. So Barbier
first shows up at the school in eighteen twenty and
he tries to demonstrate to Gilly how a variation on
the night writing system could be a useful alternative to
the embossed print system that the students were using, and
he showed off a writing device that he created that
consisted of a type of slate and a stylus, and

(24:33):
Gilly allowed the students to experiment with this briefly, but
personally he did not seem to see much use in
the system, and he passed on it. But soon after that,
Gilly was dismissed from his position at the head of
the institute after it was exposed that he had had
an affair with a much younger instructor at the school,
and Gilly's replacement a man named Andre or Alexandre Pinier,

(24:54):
who is generally regarded as having been a kinder director
with a more genuine concern for the well being of
the students. He was put in place, and Barbie returned
to make his case again. Unfortunately, I think penning A
recognized that the best judge of what kind of writing
system would be useful to the blind students would be
the students themselves, so he sponsored a period in which

(25:16):
the students could experiment with Barbie's dot based system of
night writing, and the students almost immediately recognized the superiority
of the dot based system over the system of the
embosted print letters. The dots were simply much easier to
read and to reproduce, given the help of a slate
and a stylus, than the shapes of the print letters,
and of course one of the students who participated in

(25:37):
this experiment was the young Louis Braille, still a teenager
at the time, or actually I think at the beginning
he wasn't even a teenager yet. And so Braile had
excelled as a student at the institute. He was said
to be like very clever and avid learner, and he
he had mastered the the old Hui system of of
you know, the the embost letters, and had read all

(25:58):
the books, and he eventually moved on to teaching other
students there. And so Braill saw the potential for a
system like night writing or something you know, related to it.
So what he did is he simplified Barbier's night writing
system to make it faster to read and write, creating
the Braille system. And he revealed the system in eighteen

(26:19):
twenty four. And he also later adapted it to a
musical notation exactly. And so though the idea of the
raised dots to represent sounds or letters came from barbi A,
Brail completely reorganized the code system to make it much
more practical. Original Barbier system had been the cells composed
of twelve possible dots that could you know, be arranged

(26:41):
to show the different letters. And while this cell was
easier to read than an embossed alphabetic letter like in
Hui's system, it was still too large to read very quickly.
And so what Brail did is he simplified the letter
system the cell to just six dots, which could fit
under a single fingertip and allow much faster reading. And
one crazy thing to think about is that Brail is

(27:03):
only fifteen or sixteen when he finished creating this code. Well,
let's take another break, and when we come back, we're
going to discuss the invention of Brail itself and its legacy. Alright,
we're back, so, uh, you know we've alluded this already,

(27:23):
but but let's take a minute to discuss what Brail
exactly is. It is a tactile system of written language.
It's a way, uh to read the written word via
raised dots on a surface with your fingers, and this
is of course ideal for individuals who are blind or
vision impaired. Brail, however, is not a language, yes, and

(27:47):
that's important. It's much the same way that the alphabet
is not a language. Alphabets are ways of encoding existing languages,
and so is Brail. Yeah, it's it's a code that's
been adapted to many existing language. Sense of the original French.
For instance, there's English brail or Grade two brail, and
this consists of two hundred and fifty different marks representing letters, numbers,

(28:09):
punctuation marks, formatting marks, contractions, and abbreviations. Each brail symbol
is formed via brail cells, each show with spaces for
six raised dots. So a full brail cell contains six
raised dots and two parallel rows of three dots each.
You've probably seen them before, but they look kind of like,

(28:30):
you know, they can sort of resemble like dominoes or
the sides of a die. Yeah, imagine a domino with
space for only six dots, again in two vertical rows
of three. And of course, as you mentioned, there are
different forms of brail, right, So first let's consider the
most basic form, what's generally referred to as uncontracted brail.

(28:52):
This is helpful for beginners learning brail. For instance, so
if you have in this system, if you have a
phrase and you want to spell it out, you spell
it out letter by letter, so you would you know,
if you're writing, um, you know, and then it came
to pass, you would do A than you would do
in than you would do D, and you would just
spell out every word in this sentence. But there are

(29:14):
of course many words in the English language that are
usually just read as sort of units. You don't have
to go one letter at a time, right, Yeah, you
think of site words for instance, you know the words
where you just you just look at it and you
know it. And so this is where we get into
contracted brail, in which some hundred and eighty different letter
contractions come into play to shorten and simplify everything, making

(29:35):
it again faster to read and easier to write. By
the way, I know some of you who have listened
to past episodes of Stuff to Blow your mind to
deal with with the Mandarin language, or particularly Chinese typewriter,
you might be asking yourself, huh, I wonder how Mandarin
is translated into brail, because it's not a phonetic written language. Yeah,

(29:58):
well it it. I've looked this up, and the way
it works is that the Chinese brail represents the sounds
of language rather than the many Chinese characters that would
be involved in in traditional written Chinese language, so it's
a little bit different. Each symbol contains three Brail letters initial, final,
and then something representing the tone. Uh So, in a way,

(30:19):
it's kind of like opinion brail, you know, in which
Mandarin Chinese is rendered in um, you know, in in
in in Western characters like transliterated script. Exactly. Now. I
mentioned the slate in the style USTs earlier, and that's
an important tool for writing in Brail because it helps
guide the writer in order to punch out the letters

(30:41):
to form the code they're creating, and helps keep the
letters evenly spaced and along the same line and against
so much easier than trying to then create embossed letters
on paper. Yeah, exactly. And so as for this invention,
I was just thinking about how we sort of alluded
to this earlier. But I think it's important to think
about how Braill was not the first attempt to create

(31:04):
a reading and writing system for the blind and visually impaired.
Before this, you had things like the embossed alphabetic letters
of Valentin Hui, you had the night writing of Barbier,
and these inventions were not worthless. But despite the efforts
of these inventors, they weren't nearly as useful or efficient
as they could have been. And it took the insights

(31:24):
of Louis Brail himself to streamline the code system to
its optimal form. And I can't help but think that
this must have something to do with the fact that
Brail himself was a blind reader with direct personal experience
of the day to day issues faced by blind readers,
understanding sort of the texture of the experience, what it's
like to read with one's fingers, and having no other

(31:47):
choice but to read with his fingers, and so he
was able to imagine improvements in the system that others didn't.
And this sort of reminds me of something that often
seems true about invention, that the insights that often lead
to the best inventions are not always just rooted in
things like engineering, genius, and creativity. They also are rooted

(32:07):
in habitual familiarity with the kinds of problems that the
invention is needed to solve, like hands on experience. Yeah,
and and really, the Brail, even if we go go
back to the roots in night writing, like that was
and that was rooted in an attempt to solve a
problem UM that the the innovator had a real world

(32:29):
experience with UM. And granted it was military situation, but
then and then this technology has passed on to Brail,
who has a direct experience of the sightless world and
uses his familiarity with this you know, you know, altered
sensory experience to create Brail and uh, and this is

(32:50):
the system we have today. Like, this is still the
standard for for for written language for the blind. Yes,
that we should mention that. Since then, there have been
other types of of encoding written language for the blind, Like,
there are other One thing I've been reading about is that,
for example, there are other systems for people who became

(33:11):
blind later in life, and we're more used to the
alphabetic language. Uh. That's something a little bit more like
the old Hui system. Right, It's got like embossed letters.
There are also versions that attempt to sort of like
mingle the two, where you sort of like make letters
out of raised dots. And that's designed to be useful
so that like, if you are a blind writer, you

(33:32):
can use that too. It might be slower going, but
can produce a script that's also readable to people who
only know like the sited alphabet. Right. And then Brail
has continued to evolve over time, first of all, to
meet new language demands. So We mentioned the Man for
an example, but another great example is Niemth Brail, a
form of brail developed in nineteen fifty two by American

(33:53):
mathematician and invent or Abraham Niemoth, who was by the way,
born blind UH. And it was officially integrated in to
you needed United English Brail in and it is used
to write mathematics in brail. UH. There's also the Gardener
Salinas brail codes created to codify math and scientific notation,

(34:15):
and there's also the Brail code of chemical notation. From So,
we've seen this sort of continual broadening of the system
as the system has needed to UH to explain and
express different systems, different written systems, in addition to just
sort of core UH written language needs. Now, of course,

(34:36):
there are continuing challenges in adapting brail technology. I mean,
one thing that might be rather obvious is the idea
that a lot of the text we encounter today happens
not on in printed text but on screens. That's right. Yeah,
so we've seen we have seen some amazing breakthroughs though
with a refreshable brail to spread displays. These provide access

(34:56):
to information on a computer screen by electronically raised and
lowering different combinations of pins in brail cells. And uh,
this is you know the kind of price technology. Um,
the price of brail displays range from thirty fifteen thousand
dollars depending on the number of characters displayed. And then
there's the whole history of of brail writing machines and

(35:19):
brail printers. Uh. Frank haven Hall presented the first brail
writer machine in and various improvements came with time. Today
we even have you know, brail computer printers, portable brail
note taking devices, and then the brail displays that we've
already mentioned. Um, you have, but brail printers range from say,

(35:42):
small scale brail printers that cost between eighteen hundred and
five thousand dollars to large volume ones that can cost
between ten thousand and eighty thousand dollars. But but the
technology exists. You can hook a printer up to a
machine and print in brail if you have the right technology.
Other bit of technology worth noting the brail wristwatch, where

(36:03):
you lift the lid of the time piece to quote
unquote touch the time. This makes me wonder about a
question that I don't know if we can really fully
answer that we might be able to say a little
bit about it. Is um, the question of how the
experience of reading is different or is it different when
you're reading with eyes versus reading with your fingers. I

(36:26):
was wondering about this as well, because it's you know,
I guess my experience and this is limited. But but
just thinking about the differences between reading written text and say,
listening to an audio book. Yeah, it's a very different,
expert different experience. You can still I mean, ultimately, I
guess the if you have to like drive home, like, well,

(36:46):
what are the difference businesses between reading the Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe versus uh, listening to it in
the car? Um. I mean, it's still the same story,
still has the same characters, but there but there is
something different about the experience. It's a different way of
absorbing the content. Yeah, I wonder what those differences are, like, um,

(37:06):
with with Braill versus these other means. Yeah, I don't
want to necessarily go like full Marshal McCluin, but I
do believe that, like the physical substrates of our media
do play a role in shaping thought in culture, in
the nature of the experience of the information that gets
shared on that media. So if printed text is one
medium and brail is another, is that experience of reading

(37:27):
one versus the other substantially different and in terms of
the internal sensation of reading one versus the other, I
don't know what the answer is. I was trying to
look for it was trying to read around on this
and I couldn't find much on the subject, though maybe
there's good stuff out there. I did come across a
study in Current biology from the year two thousand eleven
by Rice's ved Cohen and Amedi called a ventral visual

(37:51):
stream reading center independent of visual experience. And so what
the authors of this study it was a neuroscience study
where they did an fmr I speriment on, you know,
measuring brain function while people were reading across different media.
And the authors said that there's this pathway in the
brain that is thought to be important for reading visual text,
and it's called the visual word form area or the

(38:13):
vWF A and the author's right quote. This study investigated
which area plays the role of the vWF A in
the blind. One would expect this area to be at
either parietal or bilateral occipital cortex, reflecting the tactle nature
of the task, and cross moodal plasticity, respectively. So they're

(38:34):
thinking that, Okay, if somebody's reading with their fingers, that
they would expect the parts of the brain involved to
be like parts of the brain that are normally associated
with touch sensation. But the author has used FMR I
to see what brain activity looks like when blind readers
read in brail, and what they found was quote striking
anatomical consistency within and between blind and cited readers. And

(38:58):
so the authors this led them to proposed that the
visual word form area is not necessarily about visual words. Instead,
it's quote a metamodal reading area that develops specialization for
reading regardless of visual experience. So that's fascinating, Like, if
they're correct about this, it means that there's sort of

(39:20):
a suite of brain functions that are used specifically for
consuming symbolic representations of language, whether that symbolic representation is
visual seeing of letters or tactle feeling of dot cells.
And the authors say that this, uh, this they believe
supports the model that brain areas are quote task machines,

(39:43):
not sensory machines. But that's really interesting again, if they're corrected,
it suggests that there's something deeper about reading that is
more fundamental than visual processing. Reading isn't just about seeing.
There's something in the brain that is the reading function
that's deeper than seeing. And that's really when you get

(40:04):
down to it, like, that's what brail does. It like
it it gets straight to that process and cuts out
the complexities of just trying to take this existing visual
system and make it uh readable by the blind. You know.
Another way that I think Brail is really interesting in
technology history is it is absolutely not a case where

(40:26):
the delay and the invention of Brail was caused by
some lack of technology. Right. It wasn't that that we
didn't have electricity or didn't have X, Y or z
that allowed us to produce this technology. It was really
just a lack of people turning their attention towards this
task and putting resources into it. Right. There is a

(40:47):
certain level of cultural advancement that needed to be in place,
cultural values that needed to be in place. I also
think there's a case to be made for just sort
of the shrinking of the world, you know, the growing
of populations, and and also the way that the communities
of the blind could be brought together too in cases
like this begin to solve problems that they faced individually.

(41:11):
That means that they faced as a group, you know,
because there's a school for the blind, there's a place
for Charles Barbier to go with his night writing invention
and say I think this might be useful exactly, and
then a place for an individual like Brail to rise
to prominence. Yes, now I didn't even you know, I
didn't even go down the sort of sci fi track

(41:31):
here on this, but it does make me wonder if
there are any science fiction treatments that explore the possibility
of of what a written communications system in an inherently
blind uh civilization might consist of. You know, um, because
one of the we focused on some of the the

(41:53):
interesting aspects of Brail in which it is a system
by the blind for the blind, but of course it
is based that it stems from a system and a
culture of the sided. Uh. One wonders like what a
purely um, a purely a tactile writing system might have
consisted of. Maybe it would be very much like Brail. Well,

(42:15):
there you have to wonder again. Either way, language begins
as a spoken and heard the like it's oral um
and so that it gets translated into symbolic coding like alphabets,
and then later like brail. You didn't have to have
the alphabet in between. You could have gone straight from
spoken language to brail, right, but it had to start

(42:35):
with spoken language there. I wonder are you asking, maybe,
like if you could have gone straight from an auditory
and spoken language to brail or a language that is
tactile from the beginning, Yeah, Like what would like would
it would it? Would it be necessary too? Like we
have the alphabet standing between spoken word and brail? Uh,

(42:57):
but yeah, what would it would it be like if
there was a more erect line between these two systems,
or would it just be necessary to invent something like
the alphabet some other version of the alphabet to to
serve as these sort the translation of these two sensory experiences.
I don't see any inherent reason that would have to
be anyway. I find language technology generally fascinating, and I

(43:21):
want to continue to return to the idea of language
technologies as we as we go on in this show,
because I wanted, for example, explore the idea of invented
languages people try to invent languages. Why do these not
catch on? How come it's so hard now impossible to
really do it? Oh? Yes, I definitely want to come
back to this, because you have you have invented languages

(43:42):
that sort of have a a higher or more noble purpose,
and then you you have um fictional languages of the
likes of Klingon, which are which is still a linguistic
linguistic system created. Uh you know, with all the hallmarks
of an actual language. It can be learned, it can
be spoken. Uh So yeah, I would love to come
back and discuss that. So much of the of that

(44:05):
is uh, you know, not being a linguist myself, and
you know, the concept is is kind of foreig into me. Like,
for instance, when I think of JR. Tolken, you know,
it's easy to think, oh, you know, I'm totally behind
the idea of setting down and creating an entire world
of of monsters and magic. But then the idea of
setting down and also creating an entire language for one

(44:26):
of the people's or numerous uh species in the given world,
that just sounds like way too much worked for me.
But then again, I'm not a linguist. Maybe creating languages
is one of those things, kind of like playing a
musical instrument, Like it's not really fun until you're good
enough to do it, you know. Yeah, Like it seems
not fun to you because you wouldn't know where to start.
But if you were a linguist and you had all

(44:47):
kinds ideas about the roots of language and how words
are formed and all that, maybe then it's just a blast.
One thing I would love to explore in this hypothetical
episode on fictional languages is if one had to choose so,
like an alien species comes down dominates the earth and says,
all right, all your all these existing languages that you're using,
they're all garbage. We're getting rid of all of them.

(45:08):
You guys get to vote on it, on which language
you're all going to use, But it can only be
a language that was developed exclusively for a film or
TV show, Like which one is? Like, is nave better
than cling on? Is cling is close? Doth rat Like,
what is the most robust and useful fictional language system?

(45:29):
The doth racky have no words? The thought experiment. Yeah,
that's see, that's the problem that I feel like we
might run into it. It's probably cling on. That's my my,
my guests. Based on some very preliminary research, the cling
on seems to maybe have received the most work, but
I could be very wrong on that, you know, Robert,
Judging on our history with listener mail, I bet a

(45:49):
couple of listeners are going to write in with thoughts
about this. We're gonna receive some opinions. Well, I hope so.
And likewise, I do hope we hear from from any
listener out there who who needs Brail or you know,
anybody who is blind or vision impaired that has some
additional insight that they would like to share on this topic.
And also, if you've I mean, if you've had the

(46:11):
experience of both reading printed text and reading brail, do
you think that there is a major difference in the
experience of reading the two And if so, what is
that difference? Like? All right, so we're gonna close it
off there, But if you want to check out all
the episodes of Invention, there are several different ways to
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(46:33):
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power to do so. That helps us out immensely. Thanks
to Scott Benjamin for research assistance with this episode, and

(46:57):
thanks to our awesome audio producer Tory Harrison. If you
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