First Books in Braille
Pignier created still another opportunity for Louis, appointing him the first blind apprentice teacher at the school. Louis taught algebra, grammar, music, and geography. Despite his busy schedule, he kept tinkering with the code. By 1828, he had found a way to copy music in his new code and eliminated the dashes.
In 1829, at age 20, he published Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them, his first complete book about his new system. A few years later, he, Gabriel Gauthier and another blind friend and former pupil, Hippolyte Coltat, became the first blind full professors at the school. This meant they could leave the school occasionally without asking permission, got their own rooms, and had gold braid added to their uniforms as a mark of rank. All three new teachers used the new alphabet in their classes.
The same year, Louis Braille was drafted and was represented at the recruiting board by his father. A census record of this encounter shows that Louis was exempt from the French army because he was blind, as a result of which he "could not read or write," an ironic footnote for someone who had largely solved one of the great problems of literacy before he was out of his teens.
Spending so much of his life in the unhealthy school building and living on a poor diet caused Louis to develop tuberculosis in his mid-twenties. The diagnosis probably did not surprise him. For years, his fellow students had become ill in such numbers that a visitor complained that the students could barely stand for long in a straight line for all the coughing and wheezing.
For the rest of his life, Louis had periods of health and energy interspersed with terrifying hemorrhages and near-fatal collapses. Still, despite his illness, teaching load, and several jobs playing the organ, he worked on at refining the code. Although French does not use a "W," Louis added it later at the request of an English student, the blind son of Sir George Hayter, portraitist to the British royal family. He worked hard on the Braille music code as well, probably spurred not only by his own musical abilities, but by those of his friends. Gabriel Gauthier was a composer as well as an organist, who would eventually produce his own work among the first volumes of Braille music.
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