Night writing

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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 cardboard. It was designed by Charles Barbier in response to Napoleon's demand for a code that soldiers could use to communicate silently and without light at night. Called sonography, each grid of dots stands for a letter or phoneme.

Barbier's system was related to the Polybius square, in which a two-digit code represents a letter. In Barbier's variant, a 6x6 square includes most of the letters of the French alphabet, as well as several digraphs and trigraphs:

	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 letter (or digraph or trigraph) was represented by two columns of dots, in which the first column had one to six dots denoting the row in the square and the second had one to six dots denoting the column: e. g. 4-2 for "t" represented by

•	•
•	•
•
•

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

Barbier's system was too hard for soldiers to learn, and was rejected by the military; in 1821 he visited the National Institute for the Blind in Paris, France, where he met Louis Braille. Louis 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 system — which revolutionized written communication for the visually impaired.