Louis Braille’s Earlier Ideas, Ranked

In 19th-century France, 15-year-old Louis Braille invented his famous tactile codex while still a student at a school for the blind, but Braille wasn’t the first thing he tried. These are our favorites of his earlier ideas:

8. Lickbooks

Making all the letters of lickbooks (livres de la langue) taste different was too time-consuming. Plus, the books were soon sopping with saliva and thus impossible to lend. But it wasn’t all a waste! To this day, envelope adhesive still tastes like “R.”

7. Musical Reading

Braille got Parisian street performers to “play” books by assigning each letter a note on the accordion. The ensuing cacophony was unlistenable. However, it paved the way for experimental, atonal music which people now claim they enjoy to sound sophisticated.

6. Scratch-and-Sniff Letters

While Braille’s school friends agreed that “W” was deliciously pine-y, they said the idea was unoriginal, deriding it as merely “lickbooks for the nose” (livres de la langue pour le nez).

5. Raised Dots on Paper

He floated the concept for what we now know as Braille early in the process. Unfortunately, he first called it “Finger Bumps.” His friends said that sounded like an infectious disease, so he tabled the idea for a few years.

4. Prussian Readers

Turning to political advocacy, Braille wrote a letter to King Louis XVIII arguing that His Majesty could provide his blind subjects ample reading assistants by renewing conflict with Prussia and taking prisoners of war. The king did not reply.

3. Anti-Reading Campaign

Frustrated with his lack of progress, Braille campaigned to convince sighted people to stop reading altogether under the slogan, “What have you really gained from this?” It was the first known political campaign run by the blind, but France did not adopt illiteracy.

2. Sign Language

Depressed and exhausted, Braille completely lost focus on which problem he was trying to solve. Sign language helped millions, just not the millions he intended to help.

1. Animal Literacy

In a shocking scientific breakthrough, Braille taught several donkeys to recognize letters and stomp them in Morse Code. But the donkeys became voracious readers and abandoned the blind students for Paris’ famed salons in order to witness human literary debate and try cigarettes.