BIRTH ANNIVERSARY OF ISSAC NEWTON AND LOUIS BRAIlLE, 4th january

Louis Braille was a French educator and inventor of a system of reading and writing for use by the blind or visually impaired. His system remains known worldwide simply as braille.

Louis Braille was born in 1809, in a small village near Paris. His father made  leather goods to sell to the other villagers. Louis' father often used sharp tools to cut and punch holes in the leather.

One of the tools he used to makes holes was a sharp awl.While playing with one of his father's awls, Louis' hand slipped and he accidentally poked one of his eyes. At first the injury didn't seem serious, but then the wound became infected. A few days later young Louis lost sight in both his eyes. The first few days after becoming blind were very hard.
But as the days went by Louis learned to adapt and learned to lead an otherwise normal life. He went to school with all his friends and did well at his studies. He was both intelligent and creative. He wasn't going to let his disability slow him down one bit.

When he arrived at the special school for the blind in Paris, he asked his teacher if the school had books for blind persons to read. Louis found that the school did have books for the blind to read.
These books had large letters that were raised up off the page. Since the letters were so big, the books themselves were large and bulky. More importantly, the books were expensive to buy. 
Louis set about reading all fourteen books in the school library. He could feel each letter, but it took him a long time to read a sentence. 
There must be a way for a blind person to quickly feel the words on a page. There must be a way for a blind person to read as quickly and as easily as a sighted person.
That day he set himself the goal of thinking up a system for blind people to read. 
Now Louis was a tremendously creative person. He learned to play the cello and organ at a young age. He was so talented an organist that he played at churches all over Paris.
Music was really his first love. It also happened to be a steady source of income. Louis had great confidence in his own creative abilities.
He knew that he was as intelligent and creative as any other person his own age. And his musical talent showed how much he could accomplish when given a chance.
One day he heard about an alphabet code that was being used by the French army. This code was used to deliver messages at night from officers to soldiers. The messages could not be written on paper because the soldier would have to strike a match to read it.
The light from the match would give the enemy a target at which to shoot. The alphabet code was made up of small dots and dashes. These symbols were raised up off the paper so that soldiers could read them by running their fingers over them. Once the soldiers understood the code, everything worked fine.
Louis got hold of some of this code and tried it out. Louis sat down to think about how he could improve the system of dots and dashes. He liked the idea of the raised dots, but could do without the raised dashes.

The next few days he spent working on an alphabet made up entirely of six dots. The position of the different dots would represent the different letters of the alphabet.
Louis used the blunt awl to punch out a sentence. He read it quickly from left to right. Everything made sense. It worked.. and braille  was developed.

ISSAC  NEWTON 

Considered one of the greatest scientific minds of all time, mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton formulated theories about motion, gravity and calculus, among a range of other topics. The son of an illiterate farmer, Newton also was a temperamental loner and often secretive about his work. 

• His unhappy childhood helped shape his secretive personality.
• Newton was born prematurely , several months after the death of his father, an illiterate farmer in England. When Newton was three, his mother wed a wealthy clergyman, Barnabas Smith, who didn’t want a stepson. Newton’s mother went to live with her new husband in another village, leaving behind her young son in the care of his grandparents. The experience of being abandoned by his mother scarred Newton.
• Newton’s mother wanted him to be a farmer.In 1665, following an outbreak of the bubonic plague in England, Cambridge University closed its doors, forcing Newton to return home to Woolsthorpe Manor. While sitting in the garden there one day, he saw an apple fall from a tree, providing him with the inspiration to eventually formulate his law of universal gravitation.
• As a professor at Cambridge, his lectures were poorly attended.
• Newton ran the Royal Mint and had forgers executed.
• He had a serious interest in alchemy.Newton spent much of his adult life pursuing another interest, alchemy, whose goals included finding the philosopher’s stone, a substance that allegedly could turn ordinary metals like lead and iron into gold.
• From 1689 to 1690, Newton was a member of Parliament, representing Cambridge University.
• In 1705, Newton was knighted by Queen Anne. By that time, he’d become wealthy after inheriting his mother’s property following her death in 1679 and also had published two major works, 1687’s “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” (commonly called the “Principia”) and 1704’s “Opticks.”