Valentin Hauy witnessed the ridicule and was seized with a far different emotion. On this date he conceived the possibility of embossed letters for the blind. In his 1786 book, "An Essay on the Education of the Blind," dedicated to the King of France, Hauy writes: "we ordered typographical characters to be cast of the form in which their impression strikes our eyes, and by applying to these a paper wet, as the printers do, we produced the first exemplar which had till then appeared of letters whose elevation renders them obvious to the origin of a library for the use of the blind."