Night writing (nonfiction)

Barbier's Sonographie.

Night writing, also known as sonographie (English sonography), was a system of code that used symbols of twelve dots arranged as two columns of six dots embossed on a square of paperboard, and is now remembered as the forerunner of Braille.

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.

Each grid of dots stands for a character or phoneme.

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

Fiction cross-reference

• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles
• Night Writers Anonymous
• Sonomantics

Nonfiction cross-reference

External links:

• Night writing @ Wikipedia