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 in 1838 he completed the New Testament, and at the end of 1840 the whole Bible was published in embossed print. In 1833 printing for the blind was commenced in the United States at Boston and Philadelphia. Dr S. G. Howe in Boston used small English letters without capitals, angles being employed instead of curves, while J. R. Friedlander in Philadelphia used only Roman capitals. About 1838 T. M. Lucas of Bristol, a shorthand writer, and J. H. Frere of Blackheath, each introduced an alphabet of simpler forms, and based their systems on stenography. In 1847 Dr Moon of Brighton brought out a system which partially retains the outline of the Roman letters. This type is easily read by the adult blind, and is still much used by the home teaching societies. The preceding methods are all known as line types, but the one which is now in general use is a point type.

1.—Moon Alphabet.

In the early part of the 19th century Captain Charles Barbier, a French officer, substituted embossed dots for embossed lines. The slate for writing was also invented by him.

Apparatus for writing Braille. 2.

Barbier arranged a table of speech sounds, consisting of six lines with six sounds in each line. His rectangular cell contained two vertical rows of six points each. The number of points in the left-hand row indicates in which horizontal line, and that in the right-hand row in which vertical line, of the printed table the speech sound is to be found.

Louis Braille, a pupil and afterwards a professor of the Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugles, Paris, studied all the various methods in which arbitrary characters were used. Barbier’s letter, although it gave a large number of combinations, was too long to be covered by the finger in reading, and Louis Braille reduced the number of dots. In 1834 Braille perfected his system. Dr Armitage considered it was the greatest advance that had ever been made in the education of the blind.

The Braille alphabet consists of varying combinations of six dots in an oblong, of which the vertical side contains three, and the horizontal two dots. There are 63 possible combinations of these six dots, and after the letters of the alphabet have been supplied, the remaining signs are used for punctuation, contractions, &c.

The Braille system for literature and music was brought into general use in England by Dr T. R. Armitage. Through his wise,