Charles Barber

Charles Barbier (with full name Charles Barbier de la Serre ) (* 1767 , † 1841 ) was a French officer and developed the so-called night writing , a forerunner of Braille , a Braille .

Life

Barber was a captain in the French Army during the early 19th century . He was generally interested in encryption and shorthand . In particular, he was looking for a way of issuing written orders to soldiers at the front, which they could read without lighting a lantern, as otherwise they would have exposed themselves to fire from the enemy. Barbier therefore developed a code that consisted of raised points that were embossed in paper and that could be felt after turning the sheet of paper. His characters consisted of two vertical rows of one to six points, to which 36 French sounds were assigned ( phonetic transcription ). He called this 12-point font night writing or sonography . In the army, however, Barbier's night writing could not prevail because it was too difficult to learn and read.

On June 28, 1819, he wrote to the Institute for the Blind (Institut Royal des Jeunes Aveugles) in Paris, and in 1820 personally. It was there that Louis Braille , who was only eleven at the time, found out about this braille and he and his blind classmates showed great interest. Braille had suggestions to improve the code. However, due to Braille's young age, Barbier was not open to these innovations. Braille later developed the braille script that is still used today from the night script by reducing the number of dots per character from twelve to six. So every character can be felt without vertical finger movement.

Web links

• Range of characters of the "night writing" invented around 1815: barber alphabet
• Charles Barbier at Wikiwix