WRITING-MACHINES FOR THE BLIND. 643 



WRITING-MACHINES FOR THE BLIND. 



By AKTHUK GOOD. 



A NUMBER of philanthropists before Valentin Haiiy had 

 thought of various means of facilitating the ediication of 

 the blind and placing them in relations with seeing persons ; but, 

 ingenious as their isolated attempts may have been, the necessary 

 cohesion to constitute them a single whole was lacking in them, 

 and they were destined to disappear with their authors. In the 

 sixteenth century, Lucas, of Saragossa, conceived the idea of trac- 

 ing the letters of the alphabet in hollows on wood. Moseau, of 

 Paris, in 1640 devised the first characters in relief, but he was not 

 encouraged, and gave up his experiments. The English blind 

 scholar Sanderson constructed the first calculating tablets. Dide- 

 rot tells of books which were printed by Prault for blind Mile, de 

 Salignac, who died in 1763, but gives no further details on the sub- 

 ject. We are likewise ignorant of the methods followed by Ber- 

 nouilli, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, for the instruc- 

 tion of Mile. Valdkirk. The obscurity which prevails concerning 

 these essays made in times so near our own shows that they did 

 not become general, either because the methods were not practical 



Fig. l.—F AC-SIMILE of a Sttlographic Inscription in Relief, written by a. Blind Man for 



THE Journal " La Nature." 



enough, or because they were not pushed with sufficient energy. 

 The methods ot Haiiy and Louis Braille were more successful. 



Valentin Haiiy, born in 1745, was a brother of the celebrated 

 mineralogist, to whom we owe the " Crystallography." Struck 

 with the success of the labors of his contemporary, the Abbd de 

 I'Ep^e, for the deaf-mutes, he resolved to give to the blind also 

 facilities for instruction and means to cultivate their minds. By 



