Louis Braille was born in 1809 in Coupvray, France, just 25 miles east of Paris. His father was a harness maker. At the age of three — an age when young boys shouldn’t be playing in their fathers’ workshops — he accidentally stuck a pointed tool in his eye. The wound became infected, and the infection spread to his other eye, leaving him totally blind. Normally he would have been doomed to a life of ignorance and poverty (as most blind people were in those days), but young Louis’s intelligence and desire to learn were soon recognized. Through the intervention of the village priest and a schoolteacher, he first attended school in the village with the other children and at the age of 10 was sent to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris.
— Code (Charles Petzold), Loc. 306–11