Page:United States Statutes at Large Volume 120.djvu/613

 120 STAT. 582

PUBLIC LAW 109–247—JULY 27, 2006

Public Law 109–247 109th Congress An Act July 27, 2006 [H.R. 2872] Louis Braille Bicentennial— Braille Literacy Commemorative Coin Act. 31 USC 5112 note.

To require the Secretary of the Treasury to mint coins in commemoration of Louis Braille.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Louis Braille Bicentennial— 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 participants 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 creative and was blessed with dedicated parents, a thoughtful local priest and an energetic local schoolteacher, Braille adapted to the situation and attended 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 otherwise would have stopped, Braille—with the aid of the priest and schoolteacher—was given a scholarship by a local nobleman and went to Paris to attend the Royal Institute for Blind Children where he became the youngest pupil. (5) At the school, most instruction was oral but Braille found there were books for the blind—large, expensive-toproduce 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 lighting 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.

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