Louis Braille was an Innovator Not a Saint

Louis Braille's image as a saintly, sallow teacher whose raised dots delivered literacy to the blind doesn't honor his communications genius.

If I told you about a 16-year designing the world's first binary encoding scheme to represent written language, you might think it was Samuel F.B. Morse - or one of like stature.

If I told you he also invented the first dot-matrix print, you engineers associated with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Andrew Grove.

But no, it was Braille. We want to see him as leading the blind out of darkness and isolation, but a more apt image is that of a visionary whose insights mark the beginning of digital communications technology.

The Internet may seem light years beyond braille, but it follows the same concept: break down data into symbolic bits and it's a lot easier to manipulate.