The first published description of the geoboard appears to have been given as an incidental illustration to Denis Diderot’s Letter on the blind (1774).

The savants of the eighteenth century were interested in blindness as a problem for speculative philosophy. If the mind is a tabula rasa at birth, how will it develop if the sovereign sense is absent? Diderot held that the blind man would not only form different physical concepts, but different aesthetic and even different moral values. In the end he would inevitably come to a different set of religious beliefs and hence, Diderot argued, the concept of God was relative to our senses.