Louis Braille: A Touch of Genius - Hardcover

C. Michael Mellor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0939173700 ISBN 13: 9780939173709

Publisher: National Braille Press, 2006

Synopsis

This new biography includes 31 never-before-translated letters, some written by Louis's own hand. An extraordinary collection of documents, photographs, and artistic works--some unearthed from a curator's private archives in France--complement Mellor's meticulous primary research into Louis's life as a child, student, teacher, musician and genius inventor. This new, visually elegant hardcover book adds a dimension to the material on Louis Braille's life that has fed schoolchildren's biography projects for many years.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

In the early weeks of 1809, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, and Louis Braille were born. These three remarkable men would lend their brilliance to a century of great change and innovation, but only one escaped fame in his lifetime.Louis Braille was born sighted, and accidentally blinded himself at the age of three. He was fortunate to be sent to Paris to board at one of the world's first schools for blind children. There, at the age of 12, he began to work tirelessly on a revolutionary system of reading and writing by touch. Braille's passion to improve life for "my fellows in misfortune" was the driving force behind his creation of a code of raised dots that gave blind people the gift of literacy for the first time, whether they speak French, Chinese, or Urdu. His collaboration on the invention of the raphigraphe, a precursor to the dot-matrix printer, is further testimony to his creativity and innovativeness.Drawing on primary sources that sort fact from fiction, Louis Braille: A Touch of Genius is the first ever full-color biography to include 31 never-before-translated letters, some written by Braille’s own hand. An extraordinary collection of documents, photographs, and artistic works enhances the bibliographic narrative of the phases of Braille’s life – as a child and student, talented musician, beloved teacher, astute businessman, and genius inventor.

About the Author:

C. Michael Mellor embarked on a biography of Louis Braille when he first saw the letters of Louis Braille on display at l’Institut National de Jeunes Aveugles, the school in Paris where Louis was a student, teacher, and creator of an embossed code that carries his name. As editor of the Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind for eighteen years, Mike has long held a fascination for braille. His published paper, “Making a Point: The Crusade for a Universal Embossed Code in the United States,” was delivered at the International Conference on “The Blind in History and the History of the Blind,” in Paris, France, where he came upon Louis’s extant letters and decided to translate them for publication. Mellor holds an MA in the History of Science from the University of Leeds in England, where he was born. During National Service with the Royal Air Force, he maintained electronic equipment on jet fighters. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he enjoys being an urban farmer.

About this edition

• Publisher: National Braille Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0939173700
• ISBN 13: 9780939173709
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 133