Thomas Lucas

Thomas Mark Lucas (c. 176418 May 1838) was a British educator of the blind, founder of the Royal London Society for Blind People, and developer of the Lucas tactile alphabet system, an alternative to the Braille system of reading for the blind.

Early life Thomas Mark Lucas was born in Bristol around 1764. Little is known of his early life or family, except that he received a pocket Bible from his father at a young age and "remained a man of deep religious conviction throughout his life".

By the early 1800s, Lucas was living at Castle Street, Bristol, and was employed as a merchant and teacher of shorthand, an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing.

The Lucas system signs for different characters appeared simple in outline but in practice could be confusing as similar signs were used in many positions. Consequently, it was not widely used.

Sometime between 1830 and 1832, Lucas set up a small, free school for blind children at Old Market Street, Bristol, where he taught shorthand and English grammar to blind children. The latter was published after Lucas's death.

Between 1838 and the 1860s the Lucas system was developed for foreign languages and music, and secular and religious works in the Lucas system were distributed throughout Britain and the British empire as well as in India and China. One of the last books published in the Lucas system was Fifty Anecdotes on Various Subjects. In T. M. Lucas's Embossed Stenographic Characters, by Reverend J. W. Gowring and embossed by blind pupils at the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read, published in 1867. A rare – perhaps the only surviving – example of embossing apparatus used for the Lucas system is held by the Science Museum, London.

In 1871, the Lucas system was still in use in seven institutions for the blind, whereas Braille was only used in four; it was not until 1891 that the Royal London Society for Blind People discontinued the production of materials which used the Lucas system although they had ceased to teach the system in 1861. By the 1890s, the Braille system had become the standard form of "reading by feel" for the blind.

Publications T.M. Lucas, Instructions for Teaching the Blind to Read with the Britannic or Universal Alphabet, and Embossing their Lessons &c (Bristol: Philip Rose and Son, 1837)