At the age of three, I decided that the most logical use for a sharpened leather-working awl was to aggressively poke holes in a piece of scrap leather and one slip and suddenly i was the poster boy for not playing with pointy objects.
By the time I was five, the infection had finished its work, and my world went from vivid colors to no colours at all.
When I arrived at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth, I was ready to learn everything. The problem was that the library was basically a decorative collection of heavy, embossed wood blocks. Trying to read those was like trying to decipher a secret message carved into a piece of furniture, it took forever. I wanted to read books, write letters, and most importantly, get through my music scores without having to memorise every note through sheer, exhausting repetition.
Look, my eyesight would have been nice to have for, say, checking out the architecture of Paris or maybe finding my socks in the morning but living in the dark forced me to look at the world through my skin. It forced me to listen carefully, to think structurally, and to realize that if the world wasn’t built with you in mind, you have two choices of complaining about it or building a better system.
Then, Captain Charles Barbier showed up with his writing system which was designed for soldiers to read messages in the dark without lighting a lantern because, you know, being spotted by the enemy while reading your map is a bad career move. His system used a grid of twelve dots. Twelve!
Imagine trying to read a tactile character that’s the size of a postage stamp. By the time your finger traversed the whole thing, you’d forgotten what the first word was.
I looked at that clunky, oversized grid and thought, I appreciate the effort, but at fifteen, I did what any grumpy, overachieving teenager would do and tore it all apart. I simplified it and shrunk it down to a six-dot cell that perfectly fitted under a single fingertip.
I presented my system to the Institute in 1824. Keep in mind, I was fifteen, and I was basically telling the established faculty, Hey, your reading methods sucked so I fixed it and they patted me on the head, said, Nice try, kid, and went right back to their bulky, inefficient wood blocks.
I spent the next several years refining the system, including music notation but it wasn't until long after I was gone, tuberculosis, that people realised, Oh, wait. This blind kid ws actually on to something . You're welcome, by the way.
I went from being a kid who couldn’t handle a simple leather-punching project to creating something that started in a teenager’s bedroom because he was too stubborn to accept that reading had to be difficult.
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