Louis Braille Trivia

1. Me: "Pardon me, Mr. Braille, but may I ask you a few questions? Ten to be exact." Mr. Braille: "Of course you can. What would you like to know?" Me: "In what country were you born?" Mr. Braille:

From Quiz Pardon Me, Mr. Braille

Answer: "I was born in France."

Louis Braille was born in the village of Coupvray, France on January 4, 1809. Coupvray is twenty-five miles away from Paris. Louis was born to Monique and Simon-Rene Braille. Monique was a homemaker while Simon-Rene worked with leather.

From Quiz Louis Braille

Answer: Coupvray

On January 4, 1809 Louis Braille was born in Coupvray, a village 25 miles east of Paris. He was the youngest of four children born to Simon-Rene and Monique Braille.

From Quiz Pardon Me, Mr. Braille

Answer: An accident with a leather working tool."

Louis was working in his father's workshop when a leather piercing tool slipped from the piece of leather he was working on and pierced his eye. A female healer in the village bathed his eye, but Louis lost his sight in the injured eye and eventually an infection in his sightless eye moved to his good eye and damaged it. Louise Braille was blind by the age of four.

From Quiz Louis Braille

Answer: Accidental injury by a sharp object

At age three Louis accidentally injured one eye with an awl in his father's harness and saddle-making shop. The inflammation from the injury spread and within about a year Louis was totally blind due to sympathetic ophthalmia.

From Quiz Pardon Me, Mr. Braille

Answer: the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris."

The Royal Institute for Blind Youth was the first school of its kind in Paris. The school was started by Valentin Hauy in 1784. Father Palluy, who taught Louis after he became blind, had a letter written to the school for Louis's admittance. Louis was given a full scholarship.

From Quiz Louis Braille

Answer: He attended a school for the blind

Louis attended regular school classes with sighted children for several years. In 1819 at age ten he began attending the Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles in Paris. This school was established by Valentin Haüy in 1784 and was the first school for the blind. Haüy had devised a method for printing books with embossed letters for blind students. When Louis began his studies, the school had 100 students and only 14 books with embossed print. The school was housed in a 200-year-old building which was poorly ventilated, had wet clammy walls and smelled of mildew. Water for cooking and washing came straight from the River Seine without any filtering. The building had previously served as a seminary and a prison.

From Quiz Louis Braille

Answer: Charles Barbier

In 1821 a French army officer, Charles Barbier, presented his night writing code at the school. He created this tactile code to help soldiers communicate during the noise and confusion of battle and also at night so that a light would not betray them to the enemy. The system used 12 raised dots. It was based on sounds and did not have symbols for the actual letters of the alphabet or punctuation marks. Louis created a 6-dot Braille cell, half the size of Barbier's cell. The Braille cell consists of two vertical rows of three dots. There are 64 possible combinations of these 6 dots. He created symbols for the letters of the alphabet, numbers and punctuation marks. He also created a code to read and write musical notations. Unlike Haüy's embossed print letters and Barbier's 12-dot cell, the Braille cell was just the right size to read with the fingertip. You can see the Braille alphabet at: www.deafblind.com/braille.html. Morse Code was created by Samuel Morse in 1838. Laura Bridgman, although not as well known as Helen Keller, was the first deaf-blind person to learn language. She was born in 1829, five years after the invention of the Braille alphabet. Helen Keller was born in 1880. Commenting on the importance of Louis Braille's invention Keller said, "We the blind are as indebted to Louis Braille as mankind is to Gutenberg."

From Quiz Louis Braille

Answer: A way for blind people to write letters to sighted people

Raphigraphy was a way for blind people to independently write letters to sighted people. Raised dots were used to represent print letters. This process was time consuming (the letter "I" required 16 individually punched dots). In 1841 a blind friend, Pierre Foucault, created a piston board that produced all of the dots for a single letter at once. This could be considered the precursor to the dot matrix printer of today.

From Quiz Louis Braille

Answer: A collection of IOUs

The box contained Braille IOUs from students for the many generous loans made by their teacher. As well as leaving money to his family, Louis left bequests to his former school to help blind students find jobs. He also left money to a sighted boy who acted as his guide, a night watchman and a boy who worked in the infirmary. Louis had forgiven all debts in his will. The wooden box was burned in accordance with his wishes but only after it had been opened.

From Quiz Louis Braille

Answer: Tuberculosis

On January 6, 1852, two days after his 43rd birthday, Louis Braille died from tuberculosis. He had developed the ailment in his mid-twenties. Many students and teachers at the school suffered from bad health, no doubt partially due to the unhealthy environment of the school.

From Quiz Louis Braille

Answer: Paris

Although the students at the institute were enthusiastic about the Braille code, Braille did not become the official method for reading and writing for the blind throughout the world until decades after his death. His death in 1852 was not noted in a single French newspaper, and he was buried without fanfare in the village cemetery of his hometown, Coupvray. In 1952 on the 100th anniversary of his death, Braille's body was exhumed and buried with great ceremony in the Pantheon in Paris. However, in a somewhat macabre tribute to its world-famous son, Coupvray in the person of its mayor insisted on having Braille's hands removed from his body and buried in the village cemetery.

This is category 24583

= Top 5% Rated Quiz, Top 10% Rated Quiz, Top 20% Rated Quiz, A Well Rated Quiz
= added recently, = Editor's Pick = FunTrivia Editor = Gold Member
Teachers / educators: FunTrivia welcomes the use of our website and quizzes in the classroom as a teaching aid or for preparing and testing students. See our education section. Our quizzes are printable and may be used as question sheets by k-12 teachers, parents, and home schoolers.

 ·  All questions, answers, and quiz content on this website is copyright FunTrivia, Inc and may not be reproduced without permission. Any images from TV shows and movies are copyright their studios, and are being used under "fair use" for commentary and education.