My Braille Toolbox Part 2: The Perkins Brailler

(This post is part 2 in a series. See Part One here.) 

The second Braille gadget I acquired was the legendary Perkins Brailler. My case worker at the Department of Rehabilitation had an extra one lying around the warehouse, so he told me to take it home and see if I liked it. I wasn’t interested at first, thinking I would be getting some higher tech gizmos soon, and this one would just end up on a shelf. I’m glad I gave it a try, because it is a cool little machine and it has been a lot of fun to play around with.

So what exactly is a Brailler? Essentially, it is a manual Braille typewriter.

A photo of my Perkins Brailler from the front side.

Mechanical Braillewriters first appeared in 1892, but before the invention of the Perkins Brailler, they had all been expensive, fragile, and unreliable. When Dr. Gabriel Farrell took over as head of the Perkins School for the Blind in 1931, he determined to create a portable, durable, and inexpensive Brailler. He commissioned David Abraham, a woodworker who taught manual trades at the school, to design and engineer the project. The venture was funded by the Perkins School’s subsidiary, Howe Press, at a substantial financial risk. By the time the first run of units was produced, Howe Press had expended more than half of its capital on the project. 

Mr. Abraham spent around 15 years engineering the Perkins Brailler, and his skill and perfectionism showed. After its release in 1951, the company could barely keep up with demand. It was quite simply the best and most reliable Brailler on the market, and set the standard for other Braillers to meet for fifty years. Now there is a new and improved model, but I have one of the trusty originals.

Note that the keyboard only has nine keys. The six main keys, three per side, each emboss one of the six dots in a Braille cell. The inner two correspond to the top row, the next ones out to the middle row, and the furthest out to the bottom row. The raised button on the left is a line break, the one on the right is a backspace, and the middle button is space. The carriage must be returned manually to the beginning after every line break, using that swoopy piece of plastic just above the keyboard.

 Since each main key controls only one dot, every character must be typed by pressing the correct combination of keys simultaneously. If you miss a dot, you can use the backspace key to set the carriage over the previous cell and easily add it in. It’s not nearly as fast as typing on a QWERTY keyboard, but it is much, much faster than the slate and stylus. That page of notes that took me two hours before? Now I could type it in five or ten minutes.  

On top of that, it’s just plain fun to use. You can feed most kinds of paper into it, which means you can emboss on blank paper or add Braille to just about any printed page, card, gift tag, etc. Since I got my hands on it, I’ve been Brailling everything in sight. 

A photo of some gift tags i Brailled for Christmas presents.

The Upshot: This is still not the apotheosis of Braille technology, but its simplicity and versatility mean that I will probably always find uses for it.

 

Reference:

Jan Seymour-Ford. “History of the Perkins Brailler.” Outlook for the Blind (Nov. 2009).

5 thoughts on “My Braille Toolbox Part 2: The Perkins Brailler

  1. Very cool. These are cool to learn about and see the innovations that have made Braille more accessible and continue to relive the tedium. Thanks bro!

  2. Sounds like fun! Looking forward to hearing about the next machine you get your hands on! Reminds me of the different tools that I use for working with wood and the changes that are being made. From doing everything by hand to putting what you want into a computer and it hooked to the machine and out comes a beautifully carved picture!

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