Shubham Banerjee is a 13 year old who has completely innovated the world for the blind. Before Banerjee brought his idea to market, there had not been an affordable printer for the blind. Braille printers ran for over $2,000, which is in the budget for most of the 1.3 million blind people in the United States.
Banerjee was searching for an idea for his science fair when he came across this fact. This gave him the idea to try to create a low cost braille printer.
He was trying to engineer this device, which took him seven attempts exactly, but he finally got a working prototype. He made a working device using some Legos and some electrical wiring. He got the device to print out six dots of Braille.
After getting this to work, Banerjee was obsessed with his new project. He stayed up for hours on end with his engineer dad right beside him.
Now, as a freshman in high school, Banerjee is the inventor of Braigo, a low cost Braille printer. It looks like any other printer, except it prints our raised bumps instead of flat letters. Benerjee was able to do something that so many companies were trying to do for so long. But sometimes all you need is a young, creative mind seeing the problem and solution in a different way.
I really like that someone was able to use legos to make an affordable braille printer. Legos have been a symbol for design and creative thought, but I bet the inventor of legos could never have predicted something like this coming out of his design. It is cool how entrepreneurs work off of the work of previous entrepreneurs bringing a new level of innovation. The braille printer is something that is practical and also very necessary for a wide market. I think this is super cool that a young mind with all of its creative power was able to make a revolutionary device out of legos. I do believe the best entrepreneurs are younger, even teens, so do not let anyone put you down for being younger.
This is a crazy story of a young entrepreneur doing something many could not figure out how. I love how he was determined to make it work after he got the prototype to work. We need more people like Banerjee who spend their time working on projects that can change the world.