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# CHAPTER 3

# EARLY BRITISH CODES

1. INSTITUTIONS AND ASYLUMS FOR THE BLIND AND THE FIRST TACTILE MODES OF COMMUNICATION IN BRITAIN

2. A COMPETITION

3. ROMAN ALPHABET CODES

Gall Type

Alston Type

Littledale Type

Roman Upper and Lower Case Type

4. ARBITRARY CODES

Hughes Type

Lucas Type

Frere Type

5. MIXED ROMAN AND ARBITRARY TYPE

Moon Type

6. WRITING

7. COMPARISONS

Size and Shape of Configurations

Line Type

Punctiform Type

Presentation

Stenographic, Phonetic, and Full Orthographic Systems

8. CONCLUSION

## 1. INSTITUTIONS AND ASYLUMS FOR THE BLIND AND THE FIRST TACTILE MODES OF COMMUNICATION IN BRITAIN

Literacy for the blind developed more slowly in Britain than in France. Ritchie (1930, p.36) wrote, "If here and there the blind were kindly treated, it was because of the magnanimity of the philanthropic, not because they had any right to it ... the dawning consciousness of social justice as a right rather than a condescension was not fully understood". The first institutions were founded for the inmates to learn a manual trade "so that they might, if possible, maintain themselves by their own industry" (Carton, 1838, p.23). Liverpool, the first institution, was opened in 1791; 43 years later, "the intellectual instruction of the pupils has not been deemed of importance; they only learn a trade" (ibid., p.119).

Edinburgh Asylum was founded in 1793. Only training in manual crafts was given at first and later on oral instruction in spelling, grammar, arithmetic, geography and "a good general view of the solar system". One wonders why emphasis was given to a subject so far outside the experience of the pupils.

The first tactile aid to communication so far known in Britain came to light when it was on view prior to an auction in the spring of 1995. The following paragraph includes information given to the writer during a private viewing.

Letters patent for Mr. Casson's Panogram were taken out in 1813. John Casson (grandfather to Lewis Casson, the actor), is described as a professor of music at Liverpool, and as the copy of the specifications at the Patent Office shows that the patentee "made his mark", presumably Mr. Casson was blind. Unfortunately, the directions for use are missing, but a paper found inside the apparatus in 1856 describes it as "a method of teaching the Blind by means of Tangible Characters to write or read languages, Arithmetic, Music, etc." (sic).

Mr. Casson's Panogram - Open Position

(Reproduction of photograph.)

The Panogram consists of a mahogany box (approximately 8½ x 5½ x 2 inches) containing 300 identical small cubes arranged in rows, half in the base and half in the lid of the box which can open out flat. Each cube has nicks or grooves cut away making a different asymmetrical design on each side. As each of the six surfaces can be turned to four different positions 24 letters can be represented and similarly some of the positions could represent numbers. The cubes nest into square depressions but they protrude above the edges.

Mr. Casson's Panogram - Diagram showing six surfaces of the cubes

with corresponding letters and one enlarged 3D cube to aid explanation.

There are three small holes on the left and right of each depression for the positioning of small pegs. The letters I and U are formed by placing a peg to the left of J and V respectively.

Mr. Casson's Panogram - Diagram of letters I and U with pegs in position.

It is suggested by the writer that, by the positioning of pegs, note values and key signatures could also be indicated. Rows of peg holes occur along the sides of the box, possibly for storage and to mark the place during use. The writer found it impressive to realise the amount of planning needed at the drawing board stage to encompass so many aspects of information. As far as is known only one Panogram exists. It would have been interesting to find out how easy it would be for blind people to use such apparatus. However, the experiment was not possible because the writer was outbid by an unknown buyer.

Two members of staff at the Edinburgh Asylum for the Blind invented a method of reading the Bible by means of knotted string (Baker, 1859, pp.13-17; Ritchie, 1930, p.26). The knotted alphabet consisted of seven large knots, all different, along a string representing A, E, I, M, Q, U, and Y respectively. The remaining letters were each made from a large knot plus a small single knot at a specific distance from the large knot according to its position in the alphabet.

Knotted String Alphabet (Ritchie, 1930, p.26).

The long and tedious work of string "writing" was used for the production of the gospel of St. Mark and a few other short works. For reading to be carried out the string was unwound from a roller and the fingers "read" the knots as they passed over the user's lap. It was ingenious but it must have been very slow in use, so perhaps its merit lay more in checking the memory than for a first time reading. A method of reading from the printed word was needed.

It is noticeable that whereas only 8 institutions were opened in Great Britain between 1791 and 1826, 26 were opened between 1827 and 1882 (Farrell, 1956, p.32). Two main reasons may be recognised, the growth of humanitarianism, and an interest in code making. "Humanitarian activity was the characteristic form in which their religious piety expressed itself" (Trevelyan, 1942, p.495) hence the provision of more institutions. A competition was organised in 1832 whose aim was to find the best code for the use of the blind, and the evangelicals were encouraging the reading of the Bible. Most of the publications in embossed codes were therefore religious works, chiefly parts of the Bible and "reading was taught that the Bible might be studied and that the blind by this means might be led from theological darkness into light" (Ritchie, 1930, p.21).

## 2. A COMPETITION

A text book on reading (1820) written by Guillié and printed in his code, property of Glasgow Asylum for the Blind [now on loan to the National Library of Scotland], reached Britain and, according to a hand written note on the cover, it eventually came into the possession of Alexander Hay, who was a blind man. Evidently Mr. Hay did not like the large Roman letters for he invented a new embossed code of arbitrary letters and sent it to the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in Edinburgh for their approval. Stimulated by this effort, the Society published a report in 1832 and in the following year a gold medal to the value of £20 was offered with the following aims (Taylor, 1838, p.93): "To investigate what form and size of letters or characters, and what number of these should be adopted, with a view to constructing a general alphabet for the blind in Great Britain and Ireland; and secondly, the best and cheapest method of printing such letters or characters in relief, so as to render them most easily and accurately distinguishable by the touch".

There were 20 entries, 3 modifications of ordinary Roman characters, 12 using arbitrary characters and 5 other entries were sent in for interest, but not to be included in the contest.

The difference of opinion concerning the use of Roman and arbitrary codes was to continue for many years and to be the main cause for delay in the production of a single code. Some of the authors of arbitrary codes for the competition illustrated in Carton, 1838 (opp., p.83) seemed carried away by the enjoyment of making a series of patterns with little idea of the perceptual and cognitive problems involved. The arbiter was the Reverend William Taylor of the York School, who being sighted, it is not surprising that he chose the entry of Dr Fry of Bristol, who had used the simplest form possible of capital letters using no serifs. A reader with sight always finds it difficult to assess the qualities of a code intended to be read by touch, and even a blind person needs practice before an unbiassed opinion should be given. Comments on all codes therefore need to be made with caution. The organisers of the competition had hoped that one best type would result from their project. In fact, it had the opposite effect for the number of codes multiplied. They little realised that unity within Britain would not be achieved until nearly 40 years later.

## 3. ROMAN ALPHABET CODES

### Gall Type

James Gall, a printer in Edinburgh, was working on a code for tactile reading before the Society of Arts competition had even been considered. In the Report of the Royal Commission on the Useful Arts (1852, p.414) Gall was commended for his zeal and patience in his attempts to produce the perfect code. "It is to Mr. Gall, perhaps, more than any other man, that the interest in education of the blind was awakened throughout Great Britain and America". In 1837 (p.10) Gall described how, "perceiving that angles were more readily felt than rounds, and that the outside of the letter was more easily felt than the inside, he modified the alphabet into its most simple form, throwing the characteristics of each letter to the outside, and using angles instead of curves".

Gall Type (Ritchie, 1930, p.44)

The alphabet consisted of 26 configurations chosen from those he considered best for touch reading from all the upper and lower case letters. These were then modified in shape to make touch reading easier, yet at the same time keeping them still recognisable as Roman type. A, B, D, P, and Q became more triangular in shape, O was a diamond and G a smaller diamond standing on a stalk. The remainder of the letters were less changed from their original shape.

Some introductory books were produced and then Gall published the gospel of St. John. He entered the competition, but did not win the medal. In 1837 (p.10) he wrote, "After a long-continued, laborious and expensive series of experiments by means of blind persons, he has produced the perfect alphabet, which may now be considered the most simple, the most tangible, and therefore the most perfect alphabet which can be constructed for the blind". It is noticeable that he did not present his code as the best so far, but was quite categoric about it being perfect - the word is repeated twice.

It is worth giving some considerations to who those "blind people" were, and what success they really seemed to gain, for we are reminded of the exaggerated claims of Haüy for his embossed script some 50 years earlier. The first trials were with three or four pupils, chosen by the director of the Edinburgh Asylum, who received training by Gall three or four times a week for six months. According to Anderson (1837, p.54), "The result was nothing more than being able to make out letter by letter and a few short words, some of them scarcely that." A second trial (ibid., p.55) was made by six boys and a blind teacher at the asylum who practised daily for many months with no better result, "they even averred that they could get the gospel by heart in half the time" (ibid., p.55). Similar results were gained from a sample of pupils in London.

Later, Gall tried out "fretted type", that is the same shapes but made with embossed dots (Gall, 1837, p.56). He found that the "rough and sharp" configurations enabled the finger to be more distinctly indented while a much slighter pressure was required to produce the effect that was needed. He also found fretted embossing more durable, the shapes were less likely to "fall in the middle", the books were cheaper to produce and the pages could be printed on both sides. His earlier code was tried out at the Glasgow Asylum but it was soon superseded by Alston Type.

### Alston Type

John Alston of Glasgow Asylum used a modification of the prize-winning version sent in by Fry of Bristol. Charles Baker, superintendent of the school for the deaf and dumb at Doncaster, wrote a series of small booklets for his pupils, and thinking that they could also be suitable for blind pupils he sent them to Alston to be embossed (Anderson, 1837, p.64). One of them, "First Lessons on Religion, and a Series of Lessons on Prayer" is in the writer's possession and has an inscription on the flyleaf by Alston. The capital letters are so unvarying in proportion that it must have been difficult to distinguish the differences for a beginner and possibly also for the more experienced reader. The booklet measures 23½ cm. in width by only 13½ cm. in height, and the letters are about ½ cm. high, leaving very little space between the 15 lines for return sweeps to the next line. There was a larger fount provided for the elderly.

Alston Type (Baker, 1837, p.1)

Alston was a capable organiser and soon after the results of the competition were announced he established a committee for collecting funds for printing, and his types and printing press were ready soon after (Scottish Guardian, 1837, 7th April). Public demonstrations of reading took place in 1838 and 1841 and already by 1840 he had printed "all the scriptures" and had sent consignments of his books to the Philadelphia institution in the United States where similar embossed capitals were being used.

In 1842 (p.4) Alston wrote, "Fry's letters were too broad to be easily deciphered by touch. Having therefore made numerous improvements on the size and sharpness of the type, and to obviate the sameness of some of the letters by adding the hair strokes as will be seen in the A, R, and N, etc. I brought out several elementary books". One wonders how successful the hair strokes were.

### Littledale Type

Another modification of Roman type was tried out by Dawson Littledale who produced his code in 1838 (Armitage, 1886, p.2). Like Haüy, he used capitals as well as lower case letters which caused the reader more signs to learn and remember.

### Roman Upper and Lower Case Type

Blair in a paper read in 1868 (printed 1876, p.11) reported that "a society has been founded ... to furnish embossed books in the Roman type to the blind, at a price within the reach of the poor". The type used upper and lower case letters (Blair, 1877).

## 4. ARBITRARY CODES

### Hughes Type

G.A. Hughes, a blind man and governor of the Manchester School, described (1843, p.31) his "new puncticula stenographic system of embossing by which the blind of all nations will be able to emboss for themselves on paper without type and to attain a perfect knowledge in reading, arithmetic, etc., with unprecedented facility". His manual is still available in libraries in Britain and in America. Perkins School for the Blind, near Boston, Massachusetts, has examples of his code, but there seem to be no available examples of his work in this country. Only three basic shapes were used, a dot, a dash, and a rosette or cluster of seven dots respectively used in various positions and combinations. Armitage (1886, p.31) wrote, "It produced very good printing, could be worked tolerably fast, and was easy to learn. It was, however, expensive". Harris (1981, p.10) thought, "His system was apparently used for no more than one or two books". If this was so it is possible that the punctiform code was too radical for British taste at that time.

### Lucas Type

Thomas Lucas, a teacher of shorthand, produced a similar system for use by the blind (ibid., p.10), and he also opened a small school for them. The abbé Carton, director of the Deaf, Dumb and Blind School at Bruges, visited the school and subsequently recorded in his report (1838, p.37) "the class is not large, and the success is ordinary. One of the pupils, after a year's practice, could only with difficulty read one line which I gave him in St. John's gospel, published by Mr. Lucas and only succeeded after making frequent mistakes". It seems hardly fair to blame the method because of a poor performance by just one pupil, for the method was difficult for more than one reason.

The signs consisted of a straight line, a curve, a circle and either a straight or a curved line with a circular blob to the side at one end.

Lucas Type (Ritchie, 1930, p.51).

The signs seem simple in outline but confusion is likely to have resulted because similar signs are used in so many positions. For example, the stright line with the blob had 16 different positions according to the angle of the line and on which side of the line the blob occurred, and eight positions for the curved example.

The stenographic nature of the method was difficult for the learners, for vowels were often omitted and some wordsigns could have as many as three meanings. The first sentence in St. John's gospel starts:

in t bgini ws t wrd a t w ws w g, a t w ws g

(In the beginning was the word and the word was with God,

and the word was God).

(Baker, 1859, p.54.)

Lucas moved to London and his code was extensively used by the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read. Even after his untimely death many volumes of the Bible continued to be transcribed by the Reverend Cowring.

### Frere Type

Lucas type appeared in 1838 and James Hadley Frere also produced an embossed arbitrary code a few months later. In his manual (1840) Frere described the invention of a phonetic system based on Gurney's shorthand for adults and children, which he later adapted for teaching the blind. He printed the four gospels and part of the Acts of the Apostles. He provided a shape for each of 26 sounds and also signs for long and short vowels. The shapes were straight and hooked lines, curves and circles, and the system was written in boustrophedon, that is, reading from left to right as in visual reading, then a curved line led the finger to the next line to be read from right to left. This was considered easier than retracing back by the finger before reading could continue from the left. On the return line each letter was reversed. The boustrophedon method not only saved time but less space was required between lines and thus was a cheaper method of production.

Frere Type (Ritchie, 1930, p.53).

## 5. MIXED ROMAN AND ARBITRARY TYPE

### Moon Type

By the age of 21 William Moon had become totally blind. He had wanted to be a church minister but because of loss of sight he learned the Frere code, bought some embossed books and set up a small school. He was far from satisfied with the code and was very outspoken when he met the author (Rutherford, 1898, p.36): "I think it was in 1841 that I first met with Mr. Frere, and told him of the difficulties connected with his system of reading. He was very indignant and thought, being an older man than myself that he must know best. I told him that if he did not make the alterations I suggested or something like them, someone would, at a future date, either do so, or would invent another method which would supersede it, little thinking that I should be the very individual that would do it four years later."

The meeting is reminiscent of the one between Barbier and Braille when the latter while only young offered "some improvements", but Braille must have been far more restrained than the outspoken Mr. Moon.

One of Moon's pupils who was "very deficient in intellect", spent five years trying to master reading by the Frere system. One cannot help wondering why he was left to struggle for so long, but other pupils were also having difficulty so Moon determined to invent his own code. "In 10 days my former dull pupil was able to read sentences" (Moon, undated, braille edition, p.8).

At first scrutiny there are obvious similarities between Frere and Moon codes for some of the signs are the same but have different meanings. Moon also used the boustrophedon method. On the return line, while still keeping the signs in word order, Moon kept their shapes the usual way round, whereas Frere had reversed each sign as though reading through a mirror. There were other differences. Frere's system, being phonetic, used a single sign to represent a sound, no matter how many letters were involved, whereas Moon used a full orthography. Moon's code was therefore more suitable for children to learn to read and to spell, and for adults who had already learned by sighted methods.

Moon used alphabetical shapes, modified where necessary to make them more suitable for touch reading, and where this was not possible he introduced a few arbitrary shapes. As a result, he had an alphabet of 8 unaltered Roman letters, 11 Roman letters with parts left out, 2 more that are barely recognisable for their original meaning, and five new forms. It is sometimes difficult to recognise the origin of some of the modified letters but Moon must have considered this aspect mattered less than that they should be easily recognised by touch.

Moon Type (Ritchie, 1930, p.58)

His code met with increasing success, and it soon became evident that his future life was destined to be devoted to the provision of embossed religious literature.

So far Moon had been using movable type which involved resetting each time a page with different content was to be printed. This method was very slow and stereographic plates were too costly for the complete Bible to be embossed. He therefore experimented late at night for some while (Rutherford, 1898, p.30), occasionally burning his fingers, and eventually he was able to make suitable plates for a quarter of the cost of those used by Frere. Each plate was made of tinned iron which was washed over with a solution of chloride of zinc. His letters were made of copper wire, cut and twisted into shape and when these were laid on the plate and heated and then cooled, they were firmly soldered on. In this way he could prepare plates which could be used repeatedly. By the end of 1851 he had completed the whole of the New Testament, the Psalms and part of the book of Isaiah (Moon, undated, braille edition, p.16).

About 1853 Moon met Sir Charles Lowther (Rutherford, 1895, p.63), a blind man who was encouraged to collect and read embossed literature after his mother had brought back type and books from France embossed in Guillie type (ibid. p.24). With the help of a servant he embossed St. Mark's Gospel and several of the Epistles for his personal use. He was probably the first blind person in Britain to read embossed material for this was before the work of Gall and Alston. He became interested in Moon's code and his philanthropic enterprise is shown by the fact that within a five year period he donated 9,909 volumes in the Moon code for use in Britain and America (ibid., p.63). Moon was fortunate to have knowledge of his code spread in this way.

Moon had had to give up the idea of being a minister in his early years, but now his deep religious beliefs and his evangelism, together with the enhancement of reading for the blind were to lead him to another great work. With a friend, named Miss Graham, homes for the blind were visited with a three-fold purpose (Rutherford, 1898, pp.62-63) to teach, to lend books of the Bible and to read the scriptures to those unable to read. This was the origin of the Home Visiting Society, and his son carried out similar work in Philadelphia. Moon's evangelism led to a wide dissemination of his code.

## 6. WRITING

Blind people have always found difficulty in writing alphabet symbols and there was the added problem in many systems that the writer was not able to read his script. In Britain, the first attempt was made by George Gibson of Birmingham who sent his apparatus and an explanation to the Society of Arts in May 1827, and for his work he received the Gold Vulcan Medal (Gibson, 1827, p.91). He used prick writing (ibid., pp.90-96) in a manner which was probably similar to the method used by Mlle. Maria von Paradis nearly a hundred years earlier. He used cubes of wood with a raised sighted letter on one end for identification and the same letter reversed but made of projecting pins at the other. "If, therefore, a piece of paper be laid on a cushion, or surface of felt, and the type be pressed down, the points will enter the paper, and form on the under surface of it a raised or embossed representation". A shallow box lined with padding was provided which Gibson called a "typograph". It had slots on two opposite sides into which a metal bar was placed to hold the paper and a movable ruler was provided to keep the cubes in place during the writing process. The type was stored in a drawer under the tray.

Referring to the cost of paper in his day, Gibson suggested that "waste writing paper, such as has been written over with pen and ink, will answer the purpose of the blind quite as well as any other" (ibid., p.92). He wrote letters by this method and also kept his own accounts. Both Gall and Alston advocated prick writing but their respective apparatus was less sophisticated.

Gall also used a "typhlograph", which was a guide to help with handwriting (1837, pp.15-19, pp.48-51). It had a board for holding the paper, a slide-rest for enabling the writer to keep a straight line and a guide to help with forming the letters. By holding a pencil against the edges of a hole in the guide, upward or downward curves could be made, and the hole also had markings at intervals to indicate where straight lines could be started and ended. To make the next letter the pencil was held firmly at the right hand edge of the hole and then the guide was moved along so that the opposite side of the hole then met the pencil ready for the next letter to be inscribed. It is possible that Hughes' method was the most successful of those attempted before 1870 for it was regarded as providing good printing and according to Armitage (1886, p.31) the system could be used "tolerably fast".

## 7. COMPARISONS

The next few pages will endeavour to tease out some of the problems involved in the use of the Roman alphabet, and also arbitrary codes in order to bring some understanding and explanation of why most failed and only two are still in use today. The braille code was becoming recognised in France but did not begin to come into use in Britain until 1870. The main aspects to be addressed are the size and shape of the characters, their presentation in terms of clarity of line and use of space, the use of stenographic, phonetic and letter by letter systems, and finally some comments on the chaos caused by the diversity of codes.

### Size and Shape of Configurations

At first it was thought that recognition of embossed signs would be easier if the configuration was larger than those used in inkprint. The range for visual reading can be enormous from letters on an air balloon in the sky to small print on a bottle of pills. By comparison the range for tactile reading has to be very small indeed. Only one letter at a time can be sensed, and if it is larger than the size of the finger pad then up and down and rotary movements will occur in attempts to collect the required information. These extra movements interrupt the light, even progression along a line of signs which is the best method leading to comprehension of words and sentences. In other words, if the sign is too large, the reading process is slower, and at the opposite end of the scale, if the signs are too compressed and produced too close together, the image seems blurred as in type that is too small for visual reading. Size and spacing of characters are critical factors for successful tactile reading.

### Line Type

The early code makers who used an embossed Roman alphabet were, a priori, bound to find difficulties. Visually the alphabet signs seem simple, but tactually they are hard to decipher because many of the signs are complicated to the touch. To take a few examples: a capital A has a simple outline but the internal crossbar is difficult to sense; M and W are even more difficult because of the number of down strokes; and a lower e has a difficult curve to sense and the gap at the right may not be recognised so that the letter may be misread as an o. Densely packed configurations are extremely difficult for perception and cognition to take place. Haüy, Guillié and Dufau in France, and Alston and Gall in Britain, experimented with different sizes of character but comparatively few pupils met with success. The problem was further compounded by the fact that large bulky books were very time consuming and costly to produce, so it was tempting to make the characters smaller than suited the majority of users.

Gall had showed some understanding of the problem when he wrote of "throwing the characteristics of each letter to the outside" (1837, p.10), but if he had taken that idea too far the letters would have been unrecognisable to those with vision. The sighted code makers of the time had not enough understanding of the processes involved to be able to accept the idea of an arbitrary code. They considered that their codes should be recognisable to sighted and blind alike. On the other hand, Moon, who had once had vision before he became blind at the age of 21, understood the problem and was prepared to go further. Keeping some of the easiest alphabet shapes helped readers who had once read by a sighted method and by altering others to very simple shapes he achieved more success.

### Punctiform Type

The success of embossed dots over line type had been discovered in France, but in Britain at this time the nearest approach to braille were the codes of Littledale and Hughes. Gall was reaching out towards this method when he discontinued using his angular shaped alphabet letters and used simpler shapes with a fretted surface. If Hughes' code had been better known in his day the standard of reading might have improved.

### Presentation

The discomfiture of reading cramped letters on a badly presented page is well known, and it must be even more frustrating if similar faults occur in tactile reading. Embossed characters not only need to be of suitable size and clear in outline, but pleasant to feel as well. More variations are possible than may at first seem likely, and these include an easily recognised line or dot that is pleasant to the touch and of suitable height and with good spacing variables. The early code makers tended to pay too little attention to spaces between lines for fingers to make return sweeps between two lines of characters to the beginning of the next line. This may be because of lack of imagination on the part of sighted code makers, and was certainly also because of cost. The spacing between lines was not so critical where the boustrophedon method of printing was used.

Taylor, who judged the competition organised by the Society of Arts, was an advocate of the use of Roman type. He wrote (1838, p.102) the greatest sum of advantages "may not be the one which occupies the least space, for the bulk of books is of much less importance that the ease with which the contents can be perused". When Gall started using fretted letters he found that less pressure was necessary in production of material, so for the first time he was able to use thinner paper and introduce printing on both sides by the use of interlining. That is, the line on the reverse side occurs between the lines of the first side. This was a distinct advantage because it made a saving in cost and the idea was used again soon after the braille code was introduced into this country. Moon paid attention to dot height as well; for more advanced readers he arranged for the lines to be "flatter as well as nearer" (report of the Royal Commission on the Useful Arts, 1852, p.421).

Taylor (1838, p.90) summed up the quality of line type required as follows: "The paper used in printing in relief should be very good and strong, not liable to tear, tolerably thick and well-sized. If it be too thick the letter will not be sharp nor well-defined; neither should the elevation be too much elevated, or it will increase the bulk of the book and be more liable to injury. About 1/40 or 1/35 of an inch is generally found sufficiently high for small type impressions. Alphabets in first books for beginners should be a little higher."

### Stenographic, Phonetic, and Full Orthographic Systems

When reading accounts of the first 50 years of code production in Britain it is easy to be left with the impression of six codes being in contention for most of the time. However, the report of the Royal Commission (1852, p.420) stated that "the present state of printing in Roman character in Great Britain is ... that every press has been stopped, while books in arbitrary characters seem to be increasing in gaining favour". Littledale and Hughes type were only in production for a short while, so the relative merits of Lucas, Frere and Moon types remained.

Lucas' stenographic method left out so many letters in the words and there were as many as three different meanings for many of the signs, with the result that it was considered by some to be difficult to learn and to understand, yet others found it easy to use. How then can this apparent discrepancy be understood? Maybe the difference of opinion can be explained by a reason which has more to do with the attitude of the time rather than emphasis on the difficulties of the code. Because Bible reading was so much encouraged, and especially for the blind, it is possible that though Lucas type might seem difficult for a first reading, the very familiarity of the Bible words and Bible stories would supply the clue to the sign meanings. That is, the text served as a reminder rather than a provider of first hand knowledge.

The boustrophedon system of printing used by Frere and Moon for their codes is of mixed value. Undoubtedly it saved time because no unproductive return sweeps are necessary, but this advantage may have been outweighed for learners by the problems of perception when meeting words in a different form in the return line.

## 8. CONCLUSION

Each time a new code was invented the originator must have considered it to be the best and therefore not likely to be superseded, but unfortunately with every new system more difficulties became apparent for the very people for whom help was intended. Learners tended to know only one code, which was the method taught by the nearest institution, and so they were likely to be debarred from being able to understand other codes. Books were few because of expense and often duplicated in more than one code. This was particularly true of the Bible and other religious works. Thus there was an extreme shortage of reading material with few subjects covered, and there was consequent wastage of money and a great deal of unnecessary frustration for readers.

Eventually, it became abundantly clear that a resolution to the crisis must be found. Meetings were arranged, usually attended by only the sighted superintendents of institution, and they tended to favour the system with which they were most familiar. They also made the mistake of thinking that the matter could be solved quickly in perhaps one or two meetings. Baker (1859, p.66) wrote: "A conference should be held, partly composed of intelligent blind men to ascertain whether it is possible to unite all parties in the prosecution of one system of printing, or whether all should persevere in a course which divides the friends of the blind and injures their cause."

One blind man, Thomas Rhodes Armitage, was to show the imagination and determination to resolve this crisis in Britain. His work will be described and evaluated in the next chapter.