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This system, New York Point, was endorsed and recommended for use in the schools for the blind in the United States at the meeting of the American Association of Instructors of the Blind in 1871.

The braille system consists of arbitrary characters standing for the letters of the alphabet, numerals, punctuation, etc. All of these characters can be made with one or more dots punched in what is known as a braille cell, two dots in width and three dots in height. As on the typewriter, each letter takes the same amount of space.

Mr. Wait, on the other hand, felt that braille was wasteful of space and so he developed a system of arbitrary characters occupying a space two dots high and extending horizontally to one, two, three or four dots in width. This type had what is known as a variable base, that is, a letter one dot wide used only one dot in width; a letter two dots wide used only two dots in width; and a letter three dots wide used three dots in width, etc. This resulted in a definite saving of space. However, lower case letters in New York Point were converted into capitals by a complicated system of adding dots under certain conditions, to make the letter four dots wide. This was so cumbersome that publishers almost never used capitals in their books.

When Louis Braille assigned a significance to a braille character he did not take into account the relative frequency of recurrence of that letter. For instance the character for "t" contains four dots and the character for "a" contains but one dot in spite of the fact that the letter "t" occurs in most languages more frequently than the letter "a."

This deficiency encouraged still another American to work on a dot system that would be superior to Braille's original code. Joel W. Smith, a blind piano tuning teacher at Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, felt that letters made in a cell three dots high and two dots wide could be read more easily and written more rapidly than Mr. Wait's New York Point system. In order to gain for a system written in the braille cell some of the advantages claimed for New York Point he worked out a rearrangement of Louis Braille's characters. To save effort in writing he assigned the characters having the fewest dots to the letters recurring with the highest frequency in the English language. To keep down the bulkiness of embossed books he evolved a set of word contractions, assigning characters to them on the same frequency of recurrence principle. This new type he called Modified braille. Smith expounded his system before the American Association of Instructors of the Blind in 1878. However, New York Point was already the officially adopted type of the association. Mr. Wait and his friends gave the young mild mannered Smith pretty harsh treatment at this meeting.

Modified braille was used more or less by the pupils of Perkins Institution but little more was heard of it outside of Boston for another decade. The official type at Perkins remained the simplified Roman alphabet, commonly called Boston linetype, in spite of the fact that it was difficult to feel and impracticable for the blind to write.

Louis Braille's system made little more progress outside of Missouri than did Modified braille. Blind pupils in some of the schools, notably in Illinois, used it for personal purposes but officially it was frowned upon as being an heretical competitor of the orthodox New York Point and the appliances for writing it were confiscated by the school authorities.

In 1890 there came onto the type scene as superintendent of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind in Philadelphia, a young man who was destined to play a stellar role in the whole type controversy. He was Edward E. Allen who had formerly taught in the Royal Normal College for the Blind in London where an English adaptation of Louis Braille's system was in use. From London he had gone to Boston as a teacher in Perkins Institution. There he became familiar with Smith's Modified braille which was in use for manuscript purposes. He liked the scientific basis on which ordinary lower case letters could be converted into capitals by prefixing two dots in the bottom of the preceding cell.

Mr. Allen found New York Point in official use at Philadelphia when he arrived there. Though, as he said, the teachers did not like the system, he retained it for two years because it was the only dot type in which books could be obtained from the government-supported American Printing House for the Blind.

In 1892 a group of seven or more superintendents of schools for the blind met at the time of the Brantford, Ontario, convention of the American Association of Instructors of the Blind under the chairmanship of Michael Anagnos, Director of Perkins Institution. This group was dissatisfied with New York Point and decided to adopt some form of braille. They appointed a subcommittee consisting of Dr. John T. Sibley of the Missouri School for the Blind, Joel W. Smith and Edward E. Allen, to decide which braille alphabet to adopt in America. After some discussion, all but one, Dr. Sibley, decided to use Modified braille in spite of the fact that no books in this type were available. In 1900 this type was renamed American braille on the suggestion of Dr. Sibley.