Louis Braille and the Alphabet of Dots

If you look closely at a medicine box in Turkey, you may notice small raised dots on the package.

These dots are braille, a writing system that allows blind people to read with their fingers.

It was invented by a French teenager about 200 years ago.

Louis Braille was born in 1809 in a small village near Paris, where his father made leather goods for horses.

At the age of three, he was playing in his father's workshop when a sharp tool hurt his eye.

An infection spread to his other eye, and by the age of five he was completely blind.

Still, he was a curious and clever child, and he learned to find his way around the village with wooden canes that his father made for him.

At ten, he won a place at a special school for blind children in Paris.

The school had a few books with large raised letters, but they were heavy, expensive and very slow to read.

Then a soldier named Charles Barbier visited the school with a system of raised dots that he had designed for reading messages at night without any light.

His system used twelve dots and was too complicated, but it gave young Louis an idea.

By the age of fifteen, Braille had created a simpler system based on just six dots, arranged in two columns of three.

Each letter could be felt with one touch of a finger, so reading became much faster.

Braille also loved music and played the organ and the cello, so he created a version of his code for writing music too.

Sadly, France did not officially accept his system until 1854, two years after his death.

Today, braille is used in almost every language in the world, on books, signs, elevator buttons and, of course, medicine boxes.