HR 2872 RFS 
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. 
This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Louis Braille Bicenten-
nial—Braille Literacy Commemorative Coin Act’’. 
SEC. 2. FINDINGS. 
The Congress finds as follows: 
(1) Louis Braille, who invented the Braille 
method for reading and writing by the blind that has 
allowed millions of blind people to be literate partici-
pants in their societies, was born in Coupvray, a 
small village near Paris, on January 4, 1809. 
(2) Braille lost his sight at the age of three 
after injuring himself with an awl in the shop of his 
father Rene, a maker of harnesses and other objects 
of leather. 
(3) A youth who was both intelligent and cre-
ative and was blessed with dedicated parents, a 
thoughtful local priest and an energetic local school-
teacher, Braille adapted to the situation and at-
tended local school with other youths of his age, an 
unheard-of practice for a blind child of the period. 
(4) At the age of 10, when his schooling other-
wise would have stopped, Braille—with the aid of 
the priest and schoolteacher—was given a scholar-
ship by a local nobleman and went to Paris to at-
tend the Royal Institute for Blind Children where he 
became the youngest pupil.
HR 2872 RFS 
(5) At the school, most instruction was oral but 
Braille found there were books for the blind—large, 
expensive-to-produce books in which the text was of 
large letters embossed upon the page. 
(6) Soon Braille had read all 14 books in the 
school, but thirsted for more. 
(7) A captain in Napoleon’s army, Charles 
Barbier de la Serre, had invented ‘‘night writing’’, a 
method for communicating on the battlefield amidst 
the thick smoke of combat or at night without light-
ing a match—which would aid enemy gunners—that 
used dots and dashes that were felt and interpreted 
with the fingers, and later adapted the method for 
use by the blind, calling it Sonography because it 
represented words by sounds, rather than spelling. 
(8) Braille adopted the Sonography method in-
stantly but soon recognized that the basis in sound 
and the large number of dots—as many as 12— 
used to represent words was too cumbersome. 
(9) By the age of 15, and using a blunt awl, 
the same sort of tool that had blinded him, Braille 
had developed what is essentially modern Braille, a 
code that uses no more than 6 dots in a ‘‘cell’’ of 
2 columns of 3 dots each to represent each letter
HR 2872 RFS 
and contains a system of punctuation and of ‘‘con-
tractions’’ to speed writing and reading. 
(10) In contrast to the bulky books consisting 
of large embossed letters, Braille books can contain 
as many as 1000 characters or contractions on a 
standard 11-by-12-inch page of heavy paper, and to 
this day Braille can be punched with an awl-like 
‘‘stylus’’ into paper held in a metal ‘‘slate’’ that is 
very similar to the ones that Louis Braille adapted 
from Barbier’s original ‘‘night writing’’ devices. 
(11) Also a talented organist who supported 
himself by giving concerts, Braille went on to de-
velop the Braille representation of music and in 
1829 published the first-ever Braille book, a manual 
about how to read and write music. 
(12) 8 years later, in 1837, Braille followed 
that publication with another book detailing a sys-
tem of representation of mathematics. 
(13) Braille’s talents were quickly recognized, 
and at 17 he was made the first blind apprentice 
teacher at the school, where he taught algebra, 
grammar, music, and geography. 
(14) He and two blind classmates, his friends 
who probably were the first people to learn to read