What Does The Kid Know?

You’ve seen it of the buttons of an ATM, or an elevator panel. Those raised dots in different patterns that can be read by visually impaired people. What is it called?

Barbier.

What? That’s not it. But it’s probably should have been.

You see the inventor of this method was a man named Captain Charles Barbier. It was an ingenious military invention he called Night Writing used so soldiers could read orders in the dark without having to light a lamp and give away their position.

Eventually, Barbier introduced his concept to the blind. A thirteen-year-old boy at the Royal Institute for the Blind was one of the first to learn the new system. He was excited by the opportunities it offered but thought it might be too complex. So he offered Barbier some ideas on how to simplify and improve it. Barbier did not welcome his suggestions. He was incensed that a mere boy could imagine he had something to offer and stalked out of the room, He angrily refused to even consider making changes.

So the boy began to work on his own to make improvements His system proved simpler and superior thought he was always as always quick to credit Barbier for his role in development.

That’s why the system isn’t named after it’s creator but it’s perfecter Louis Braille.

A poor yet wise lad is better than an old and foolish king who no longer knows how to receive instruction.

Ecclesiastes 4:13

Age has its advantages but one should never assume the younger don’t have anything to offer. Wisdom can from many sources. No matter how old or sure of ourselves we are it never hurts to listen to others in how we can improve.

Those that think they know everything there is to know have a lot to learn.

Comments

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt. He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!) Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest. Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt! Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way. He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal. As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself. He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors. But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

Why Does A Lion Tamer Use a Chair?

Ok, I know you have seen the image. A lion tamer enters in the cage of the beast and forces it to obey his commands using a whip, a gun and a chair. Now you can see how the whip and gun could come in handy but you might be wondering why a chair would intimidate an animal as powerful as a lion? Clyde Beatty taming a lion with a chair It's not that the lion is afraid of the chair -- it's that the lion is confused by the chair. Cats are single-minded, and the points of the chair's four legs bobbing around confuse the lion enough that it loses its train of thought. Casually put, the chair distracts the lion from wanting to claw the lion tamer's face off. The powerful creature could destroy the chair in moment’s notice but instead it is distracted into submission. It’s not too much different than how Satan controls us today. By the power of God we could overcome anything that he would use to subdue us. We can overcome the evil one (1 st John 2:13-14). ...

Ecclesiastes 12:10

Search This Blog