Charles Barbier

Charles Barbier de la Sierra was the creator of night writing.

Charles Barbier de la Sierra was a Captain in the French Army during the early 1800s. He was an artillery officer. Since he was on the front line constantly, he couldn't turn on a lamp when he needed to read a message because it would expose him to enemy fire. Because of this Barbier created a code that consisted of raised dots poked onto a piece of paper. This code was night writing.

Barbier's system was related to the Polybius square, in which a two-digit code represents a letter. In Barbier's variant, a 6x6 square includes most of the letters of the French alphabet, as well as several digraphs and trigraphs: A letter (or digraph or trigraph) was represented by two columns of dots, in which the first column had one to six dots denoting the row in the square and the second had one to six dots denoting the column: e. g. 4-2 for "t" represented by As many as twelve dots (two columns of 6) would be needed to represent one symbol.

Eventually Barbier introduced his concept to the blind at the suggestion of members of the French Royal Academy of Sciences. In 1821, students at the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris assembled to allow Charles Barbier de la Serre to demonstrate his system. The system was favorably received, because the older system of embossed Roman letters with its curves and straight lines was much harder for blind people to understand than the simple patterns of dots. Barbier also provided a system by which the students could write his symbols, using a special writing board and a pointed tool to make the dots. Louis Braille, who was a boy studying at the institution at the time, was interested in Barbier's method. Braille had suggestions on improving the code, based on (among other things) reducing the number of dot positions from 12 in 6 rows to 6 in 3 rows, which was easier to scan with the fingers, but Barbier, because of his aristocratic manner, felt insulted that a boy had tried to improve his code. Later Braille transformed the night writing, which Barbier had invented, and turned it into a system used to this day, Braille.

Charles Barbier Charles Barbier de la Serre