How Napoleon Bonaparte Invented the Compact Disc

You can admit it. You are intrigued. Of course, it can’t be true. But is it purely nonsensical? Is it a “pigs can fly” kind of declaration? Or is there someway, somehow, a grain of truth in it? And if that’s the case, how on earth could you conceivably connect the dots between the Little Corporal and the Compact Disc?

- KEN C. POHLMANN

The story begins in 1815. French soldiers needed a way to read documents at night, without a light source. Charles Barbier, serving in the French army, devised a coding system using tactile patterns of bumps embossed on paper. Ingenious, but far from perfect. The patterns were complicated and hard to read. Moreover, instead of directly representing the alphabet, messages had to be expressed in a quasi-phonetic manner.

Imagine running your fingers over complex patterns, trying to phonetically sound out the encoded message “The left flank shall attack at dawn.” And what if you misinterpreted the bumps as “The left flank shall attack at dusk.” Uh, oh. After evaluation, the military determined that the code was difficult to use, and prone to error. They passed.

That might have been the end of our story. But Monsieur Barbier had faith in his invention and, crucially, realized that there might be another very nonmilitary application. In 1821 he demonstrated his system at the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris. One of the young blind students there was named Louis Braille.