History of Early Intervention for Children Born with a Mobility Visual Impairment: 18th to the 20th Century

"The blind man who governs his steps by feeling, in defect of eyes, receives advertisement of things through a staff." — Kenelm Digby (1622)

With the mass of those who are blind, there is little choice; they must either walk alone or sit still; and... One of the greatest aids to him who would walk by himself is a stick; this should be light and not elastic, in order that correct impressions may be transmitted from the objects with which it comes in contact…” (William Hanks Levy, 1872).

From the earliest records, adults who lost their sight later in life have understood the value of a walking tool — a stick, a staff, a guide, or a trusted animal companion — to move safely and independently. Yet, curiously and tragically, the same logic was not extended to infants born with a mobility visual impairment or blindness (MVI/B).

For more than two centuries, parents and educators have tried to teach blind infants to walk using developmental milestones designed for sighted children — milestones that require unsafe movement as a prerequisite for learning. The result has been 220 years of frustration, delay, and misplaced blame.

The Origins of a Misguided Standard

In 1797, two blind scholars, Dr. Thomas Blacklock and Dr. Henry Moyes, wrote the entry “Blind” for the third edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Their words shaped generations of thought on how blind children should be raised.

Blacklock, blinded by smallpox at six months, was an accomplished philosopher and poet. Yet he attributed his own timidity and frailty to overprotective parents who would not let him walk without a guide. His conclusion — that parents should force their blind children to move freely, even at risk of injury — became an educational doctrine.

They wrote that a child “should lose a little blood, or even break a bone rather than be perpetually confined in the same place, debilitated in his frame and depressed in his mind” (Levy, 1872, p. 76).

This brutal advice established a “walk first, safety later” model that dominated early intervention for blind infants. It ignored what every blind child instinctively knows: without tactile feedback, walking is unsafe. Instead of recognizing this as a sensory deficit requiring a mobility solution, educators treated fear and hesitation as behavioral flaws.

No one thought to design a tool to make walking safe..

    The piano was invented in the 1700s, and in the 1800s students at residential schools for the blind were taught to play professionally or to be piano tuners. In the 1700s, Ben Franklin invented bi-focal eyeglasses for people whose vision could be corrected with lenses. Yet, in the 1700s, learned men who were blind could not even conceive of the idea of making a safety device to protect blind babies when they walked.

Nineteenth Century: Endurance as Education

By the mid-1800s, the first residential schools for the blind emerged, led by well-educated men inspired by Enlightenment ideals — but still bound by the same assumptions. Samuel Gridley Howe, founding superintendent of the Perkins School for the Blind, captured the prevailing belief in his Ninth Annual Report (1841):

“Do not too much regard bumps upon the forehead, rough scratches, or bloody noses; even these may have their good influences… they affect only the bark, and do not injure the system like the rust of inaction.”

To Howe, injury was proof of progress. Pain meant effort. Parents were advised to celebrate their children’s bruises as milestones of independence.

The tragedy was not in the intent — these educators believed in the potential of blind children — but in their refusal to see the obvious: toddlers with an MVI/B clung to parents, furniture, or walls because that was how they stayed safe. Their insistence on contact was not ignorance; it was intelligence.

Instead of recognizing this adaptation, 19th-century teachers doubled down on the myth that “courage through collision” would lead to independence.

A Century of Invention — Without Safety for Blind Babies

The 1800s saw breathtaking innovation: the typewriter, telephone, electric light, and steam engine transformed daily life. Yet no one invented a simple device to keep blind infants safe while walking.

Education for blind children flourished — in music, literature, and vocational trades like piano tuning and weaving — but safety remained overlooked. Students were expected to ride bicycles, roller skate, and play football to prove they were “as capable” as sighted peers. The cost of this philosophy was measured in fear and physical harm.

By century’s end, institutions were expanding globally. Johann Wilhelm Klein opened Vienna’s Imperial Royal Institute for the Education of the Blind (1804); Francis Campbell founded the Royal Normal College and Academy of Music for the Blind in London; and in the United States, pioneers like Howe and Emily Wells Foster sought to bring blind children out of isolation and into education.

Their goal was inclusion — but their methods remained rooted in denial.

Instead of creating environments or tools that made movement safe, they sought to “train out” the natural caution that blindness creates.

A Modern Idea at the Turn of the Century, Just Say 'There Is No Problem'.

The 19th century development of residential schools was dominated by men who had high educational and physical standards for their students with an MVI/B beginning with strict admissions requirements; the children had to demonstrate "intellectual promise" (Koestler, 1976, p. 403). Their students were expected to ride bicycles, roller skate, play football and other ball games, and run track. All to prove that blind kids can do anything sighted kids can do.

Most founders of schools for the blind did not train to be educators, and many schools for the blind were begun with just one or two children. In Vienna, Johann Wilhelm Klein (1804) took a blind lad, Jakob Braun, into his home with the purpose of educating him. His success led him to seek public funds to start a school for the blind which became the Imperial Royal Institute for the Education of the Blind. Klein published his theories which included advocating for children with an MVI/B to attend the same school as their peers.

The start of the Oak Hill School in Connecticut also began with a series of well-meant abductions. Emily Wells Foster, took blind immigrant children from the darkened halls of “a rundown tenement” to begin her school:

“Foster made her way to the tenement and, while groping along the darkened walls, she found the object of her search, literally tripping over the child as he sat motionless and silent on the dank floor. He was three years old and …feeble, deformed and unpromising…his life was absolutely devoid of interest or occupation” (Palm, 1993, p. 9).

One notable exception, Overbrook in Pennsylvania began with a study of practices in France begun by Valentin Hauy, the sighted founder of the Royal institution of Blind Children. Hauy's focus was to teach students with an MVI/B manual work skills that would enable them to earn a living. He may be best known for teaching blind children to read raised letters.

Early educators of children with an MVI/B also had access to the publications of Howe, Klein, and Francis Campbell. Howe and Klein were both sighted, Campbell, who founded the Royal Normal College and Academy of Music for the Blind, was sighted until the age of six. Campbell, like Howe & Klein, was a learned, respected, and well-traveled man.

The Problem Becomes the Solution

By the late 19th century, this philosophy was codified in a letter distributed by the Imperial Institute for the Blind in Austria (1893), later reprinted by the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind (1907) and Outlook for the Blind. Titled “To the Parents of Blind Children,” it instructed:

“Treat the blind child exactly as if it were a seeing child… Do not allow the child to sit long in one place alone and unoccupied, but encourage it to go about in the room, in the house, in the yard, and, when older, even about the town.”

Once again, the problem — unsafe movement — was redefined as the solution. The underlying message was clear: if blind children refused to move, they were being lazy.

This advice ignored the obvious: a child who cannot see what lies ahead is not stubborn, but sensible.

Educators prided themselves on treating blind children “no differently” than sighted ones, imagining this as a compliment. But equality without accommodation is not fairness — it is neglect. It demanded that blind children play sighted games, compete in sighted sports, and succeed in sighted ways, all without tools to make those environments accessible.

An impossible goal.

The 19th century ended with the widespread distribution of a letter entitled, “To the Parents of Blind Children”. It was so popular, the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind sent it out to its families in 1898; and in 1907 the journal Outlook for the Blind published the letter in its entirety. The authors advised parents to…

“1. Treat the blind child exactly as if it were a seeing child, and try as early as

possible to make it put its body and mind into action... Teach the child to walk

at the age when seeing children learn” and

“2. Do not allow the child to sit long in one place alone and unoccupied, but

encourage it to go about in the room, in the house, in the yard, and, when

older, even about the town” (p. 44).

Once again, the problem was framed as the solution.

The new twist on the old problem was amplified further in this 1898 article. The first sentence uses the phrase "do not allow the child to sit". This phrase squarely places the blame on the child. The authors are saying, the child with an MVI/B is 'getting away with the bad behavior of sitting too long'.

This speaks perhaps to the frustration felt by well-meaning and hard working teachers at schools for the blind witnessing what Howe reported, “Most of our pupils are over fourteen years old when they enter, and they have generally the quiet and staid demeanor, and the sedentary habits of adults (p. 5).

The adults were interpreting the children's refusal to freely walk and run as an ignorance on the part of the children, rather than recognizing it as a natural human reaction to unsafe conditions.

There are only arguments to be made in favor of the the next two points in the popular letter which provided expectations and goals for development that are age and outcome based. Yet, how is the child to achieve these goals of orientation when they are not provided a means of safe mobility?

It is the goal "Treat the child exactly as if it were a seeing child..." confounds logic. How can it be right that adults should not consider the degree of visual impairment when making safety and education decisions for infants?

One must consider the degree of visual impairment when making safety and education decisions

The goal of treating blind children no differently from sighted children has been heralded as the highest compliment one can pay to a blind person. This meant, blind children should be taught to roller skate, ride bikes, and be encouraged to do sport and other games that were built around the use of eye/hand coordination, without any consideration for the obvious - that roller skating blind is more dangerous than roller skating sighted.

The 20th Century: Innovation Without Inclusion

The 20th century ushered in unprecedented technology — radio, phonographs, telephones, and eventually, long canes, computers, and rockets to the moon. Yet for all this progress, no one invented a mobility tool designed for the youngest children born with blindness.

The long cane, developed for adults who lost vision, revolutionized independent travel for many. But its design — requiring precise technique, timing, and arm control — remains inaccessible to most toddlers. For them, the “rust of inaction” continues, not from unwillingness to move, but from unsafe conditions that adults have failed to remedy.

Reclaiming Safety as the Foundation

Every generation of parents of blind infants has faced the same challenge — and the same misguided advice. “Push them to walk,” they are told, “even if they fall.”

But centuries of history and modern research (Ambrose-Zaken, 2022, 2023; Penrod, Burgin, Ambrose-Zaken, 2024) now prove otherwise. Fear, hesitation, and dependence are symptoms of unsafe conditions — not of blindness itself. When safety is restored, movement follows naturally.

The Belt Cane represents a long-overdue correction to 220 years of misunderstanding. It gives children with an MVI/B what adults have always known they need: a tool that allows safe, independent mobility through tactile feedback. It turns “hand-holding” into “self-guiding,” and replaces fear with confidence.

Conclusion: Learning from History

From Blacklock and Moyes in the 18th century to Howe and the institutional educators of the 19th, the message to parents of blind children was tragically consistent: independence comes through risk.

Today, we know the opposite is true. Independence begins with safety.

As we look back across this history, one truth stands clear: the absence of vision has never been the barrier — it was the absence of protection.

And that, at last, is something we can change.

References

Howe, S. (1841). The Ninth Annual Report of the trustees, of the Perkins

    Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the blind 1841 from Boston:

   Eastburn https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=0JoyAQAAMAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA36 

Koestler, F. A. (1976). The Unseen Minority: A Social History of Blindness in the

   United States. New York: David McKay Co.

Levy, W. H. (1872). On the Blind Walking Alone, and of Guides” (pp. 68-77) in

(W. H. Levy) Blindness and the Blind: A Treatise on the Science of Typhlology.

London : Chapman and Hall

https://archive.org/details/blindnessblindor00levyiala/page/n5/mode/2up

Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. (1907). To the Parents of Blind

Children Leaflet Number I (1898). In Outlook for the Blind July.