Night writing
Encyclopedia
Night writing was a system of code that used symbols of twelve dots arranged as two columns of six dots embossed on a square of paperboard
Paperboard
Paperboard is a thick paper based material. While there is no rigid differentiation between paper and paperboard, paperboard is generally thicker than paper. According to ISO standards, paperboard is a paper with a basis weight above 224 g/m2, but there are exceptions. Paperboard can be single...

, and is now remembered as the forerunner of Braille
Braille
The Braille system is a method that is widely used by blind people to read and write, and was the first digital form of writing.Braille was devised in 1825 by Louis Braille, a blind Frenchman. Each Braille character, or cell, is made up of six dot positions, arranged in a rectangle containing two...

. It was designed by Charles Barbier
Charles Barbier
Charles Barbier de la Serre was the creator of night writing.Charles Barbier de la Serre was a Captain in the French Army during the early 19th century. "Ecriture Nocturne" was invented in response to Napoleon's demand for a code that soldiers could use to communicate silently and without light at...

 in response to Napoleon's demand for a code
Code
A code is a rule for converting a piece of information into another form or representation , not necessarily of the same type....

 that soldiers could use to communicate silently and without light at night. Called sonography, each grid of dots stands for a character or phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

.

Barbier's system was related to the Polybius square
Polybius square
In cryptography, the Polybius square, also known as the Polybius checkerboard, is a device invented by the Ancient Greek historian and scholar Polybius, described in , for fractionating plaintext characters so that they can be represented by a smaller set of symbols.-Basic form :The original square...

, in which a two-digit code represents a character. In Barbier's variant, a 6×6 matrix
Matrix (mathematics)
In mathematics, a matrix is a rectangular array of numbers, symbols, or expressions. The individual items in a matrix are called its elements or entries. An example of a matrix with six elements isMatrices of the same size can be added or subtracted element by element...

 includes most of the characters of the French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 alphabet, as well as several digraphs and trigraphs:

































































Barbier's Night Writing matrix
1 2 3 4 5 6
1 a i o u é è
2 an in on un eu ou
3 b d g j v z
4 p t q ch f s
5 l m n r gn ll
6 oi oin ian ien ion ieu


A character (or digraph or trigraph) was represented by two axes of dots, in which the first column had one to six dots denoting the row in the matrix, and the second had one to six dots denoting the column: e.g., 4–2 for "t" represented by
An example representation of the character "t"


As many as twelve dots (two columns of 6) would be needed to represent one symbol.

Barbier's system was found to be too difficult for soldiers to learn and was rejected by the military. In 1821, Barbier visited the National Institute for the Blind in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, where he met Louis Braille
Louis Braille
Louis Braille was the inventor of braille, a system of reading and writing used by people who are blind or visually impaired...

. Braille identified the major failing of the code, which was that the human finger could not encompass the whole symbol without moving and so could not move rapidly from one symbol to another.

His modification was to use a 6-dot cell, the Braille
Braille
The Braille system is a method that is widely used by blind people to read and write, and was the first digital form of writing.Braille was devised in 1825 by Louis Braille, a blind Frenchman. Each Braille character, or cell, is made up of six dot positions, arranged in a rectangle containing two...

system that revolutionized written communication for the visually impaired.
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