MILLION HAMMER BLOWS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 73, Issue 446, 11 December 1930, Page 8

MILLION HAMMER BLOWS

WORLD OF THE BLIND. MAKING BRAILLE MAPS. Four years’ work, embodying more than .1,000,000 hammer blows by expert embossers, has been expended by the National Institute for the Blind on the preparation of a school geography for blind boys and girls. The book is one dealing with the British Isles, in the “Human Geography’’ scries, and although of modest size in the printed edition it occupies seven large volumes, weighing 231 b., when transcribed into Braille. Maps and diagrams are an important feature of the work, and it was on these that the institute’s late embosser spent the last three years of his life. At the time of his death last year he had completed only 114 of the 120 needed to illustrate the book, and another mechanic had then to be trained to emboss the remaining six. The work of expressing the illustrations in such a way that they could be readily understood by blind children demanded specialist treatment. In any Braille picture a line is actually a line of dots; but in the case of these diagrams the lines varied in thickness, and had therefore to be formed of bigger or smaller dots respectively. A coastline. for example, was usually heavier than one indicating the boundary of a county, and the “tint” of dots indicating the sea had to be shown lighter than that intended to indicate mountain ranges. More than 30 sizes of punches were needed Io express these varying degrees of “colour.” At least three blows with ‘he embossers' hammer were required to make each dot. and, as the ordinary diagram contains between 3000 and 5000 of those dots, it is evident that the embossers have struck more than 1.000,000 hammer blows in the course of their work ("I 1 his HU'