Samuel Gridley Howe

In the 1830s, Samuel Gridley Howe, an educator of the blind and visually impaired, developed an embossed alphabet known as Boston Line Type. This atlas, printed in 1837, made use of this type to present geographical information for students at the New England Institution for Education of the Blind (later known as the Perkins School for the Blind). Howe invented Boston Line Type at around the same time that Louis Braille, a blind student in Paris, created the more well-known system of raised dots that bears his name. Boston Line is a Roman alphabet, with simplified angles and without capital letters.