In 1825, when crowds were watching the first passenger locomotive pull away from the station in Stockton, a blind teenage boy in France was perfecting another technology that would improve communications for the next two centuries.
This year marks the bicentenary not only of the railways, but also of the invention of Braille. This system of raised dots allowed blind people to read and write independently, at a time when the sighted world was increasingly reliant on the written word.
How was Braille adopted in Britain?
Although Braille was developed in the 1820s, it was not officially adopted in Britain until the 1870s. In the meantime, lots of British typographers—mostly sighted—designed their own tactile alphabets. Different scripts were taught in different parts of the country, with some blind schools even teaching multiple alphabets for different tasks.
There was an early attempt to standardise this and eliminate the confusion of mutually unintelligible scripts. In 1837, the Edinburgh Society of Arts announced the results of its competition to determine ‘the best alphabet and method of printing for the use of the blind’. Out of 19 entries, Edmund Fry won the judges’ approval for his raised Roman alphabet.
This was not too dissimilar to what was happening in the railway world. Various engineers developed what they considered to be the best locomotive, but before any serious progress could be made in the industry, a standardised design tested for efficiency and safety had to be decided upon. In October 1829 this competition came to a head at the Rainhill Trails on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The winner was Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’, judged for its strength, reliability, and speed.
There are some striking parallels between the way both tactile reading and railway travel were developed and adopted in Britain. In an age of seemingly exponential expansion and improvement of British society, inventors fought bitterly to have their name remembered as the pioneer in their field. In the world of locomotives, that meant the Stephensons, Hackworths, and other entries into the Rainhill Trials. And similarly for blind literacy, a series of British men devised alphabets that they deemed superior to that published by Louis Braille, including John Alston, Thomas Lucas, and William Moon.
The problem was that, unlike different kinds of locomotives which could co-exist, the multiplicity of embossed scripts led to confusion and poor communication. Whereas railway companies could invest in a few different engines for different tasks, blind education needed to be standardised if the community was going to communicate and share written material.
Additionally, the people judging locomotive design were likely to use the technology themselves. But when it came to blind literacy, it was often sighted people designing alphabets based on what they assumed to be legible by touch alone, knowing that they themselves would be able to continue reading visible print.
It wasn’t until 1868 that a committee of blind men set about determining the most suitable script for their own community. After a two year study, they unanimously voted in favour of Braille—almost 50 years after its invention!
What does this have to do with the railways?
There is more of a link between railways and literacy than it might seem at first glance. As more people travelled away from home by rail, letter-writing became almost indispensable in British culture. The first postage stamp was launched in 1840 for the price of a penny, which made writing letters affordable and reliable as a means of communication. In turn, the railways helped to facilitate these exchanges by distributing mail across the country at unprecedented speeds.
Rail travel was a product of urbanisation and industrialisation, and these phenomena were also largely responsible for rising literacy rates in Britain. There was more bureaucracy, more jobs requiring knowledge of the written word, and much more affordable reading material like newspapers and novels thanks to the steam printing press. In other words, being able to read and write was becoming more and more necessary to get by in society, and those who could not see printed text stood out. It was through this gap in the market that typographers seized the opportunity to include blind people in the world of literacy.
Rail and Braille today
The combined bicentenary celebration of Braille and Rail has not gone unnoticed. Earlier this year, Essex Sight Loss Council worked with Greater Anglia to put on exhibitions of artwork by blind and vision impaired people in train stations. Norwich, Colchester, and Broxbourne all decorated their station waiting rooms with pieces representing the spectrum of sight loss. The exhibitions also featured railway heritage signs using a combination of Braille and print to spell ‘[b]rail[le] 200’. This is a stunning piece of design, which uses the signature font of British Railways embedded within a Braille word, demonstrating the rich and inclusive linguistic culture available to us through writing.
So the next time you notice a Braille button on a train, remember that both technologies were born in the same year, and their lives have been intertwined ever since. Happy 200th birthday to [B]rail[le]!
Further reading
- C. Golden, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (Gainesville, 2009)
- M. Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian fiction after the invention of the news (New York, 2009)
- G. Phillips, The Blind in British Society: Charity, State, and Community, c. 1780-1930 (Aldershot, 2004)
- H. Tilley, Blindness and Writing: from Wordsworth to Gissing (Cambridge, 2018)