French Visionaries - Volume 1

A few very brief recognitions of some French bods who have made massive contibutions to the World with their ingenuity and foresight.

• Louis Braille – Blinded as a result of an injury he sustained when 3 years old, Braille went on to be a nationally-recognised church organist, a cellist and a teacher at Paris’ Royal Institution for Blind Youth. He redeveloped an idea of raised dots and dashes which had been used in silent communication between soldiers at the front and simplified it into the 6-dot-per-character system of fingertip reading and writing still in use by blind people today, 155 years after his death. The system has been adapted to pretty much all of the sophisticated languages in the World. A French visionary.

• Jacques Cousteau – Ex French Navy underwater exploration pioneer who raised popular interest in the biology and ecology of the oceans like nobody before or since through his many decades of spectacular and award-winning films on the subject, usually based on his celebrated boat, Calypso. Later in life, he became director of Monaco’s Oceanographic Museum and was instrumental in the regulation of the disposal of radioactive and otherwise toxic waste at sea. With a partner, he perfected the first truly effective self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA). Cousteau won many international prizes for his work and rightly so. He died in 1997 but the Cousteau Society he founded still campaigns tirelessly on marine conservation. A French visionary.

• Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot – A steam engine is a simple and efficient mechanism but, in order to use one to get from a to b, you need to convert the up-and-down motion of a piston into a rotary motion to turn an axle or wheel. Cugnot’s significance is disputed but this is entirely understandable as, were he to be recognised as the first inventor to harness this conversion of that motion and to apply it to making a powered vehicle move, then he would have to be credited with being the father of locomotives and automobiles of all kinds and, clearly, a title such as that would always be fought over. Indisputably, in 1769, he made a vehicle move by applying just such technology so, however he’s recognised in comparison with other inventors, what he did was fabulous and innovative. A French visionary.

• Joseph Bienaimé Caventou – Among the better-known plant-based substances identified and isolated by Caventou, a professor at Paris’ prestigious School of Pharmacy in the mid-19^th Century, were Chlorophyll, Strychnine, Caffeine and Quinine. Chlorophyll represents no less than an answer to the question “how do plants work and what do they mean to us?” Without Strychnine, a rat would probably be typing this message to you (don’t say it). Could you really get the same hit from your Cappuccino or Coca-Cola if you didn’t know that they were supposed to give you that hit? Had it not been for the identification of the qualities and value of Quinine, then the fight against malaria in the past might have been lost and the fact that insane European policies in relation to immigration have encouraged the reintroduction of diseases like malaria into civilised countries would be even more serious a problem than it already is. A French visionary.

• Georges Claude – The next time you’re out and about in a big city at night and you need something to eat, look out for a bright sign saying something like “kebabs” or “Indian” or whatever. Spare a thought for Claude, who, on a whim, decided to pass currents through inert gases (like helium, argon and neon) just to see what might happen. What happened was that Monsieur Claude had invented the neon light. He died 47 years ago but it’s pretty much impossible to find a street in a city today where his legacy is not visible. A French visionary.

• Augustin-Jean Fresnel – If you need a really huge convex glass lens, say 2 metres across or whatever, to focus and project light, then the conventional approach to lens construction would mean that the thickness of glass in the middle of the lens might be so great that it would be difficult to manufacture, to transport, to install and to use. The invention of the Fresnel Lens changed all that and, 180 years after his death, among many uses such as car headlamps, traffic lights, aircraft carrier landing systems and searchlights, they have revolutionised coastal lighthouses, allowing them to project light over far greater distances than had previously been possible and must have averted many a disaster. A Member of the Paris Academy of Science, Fresnel had an understanding of the behaviour of light and other waves and optical issues which was cutting edge. A French visionary.

• Jean Bernard Léon Foucault – Without gyroscopes, ships might be thrown around by the waves far more, aircraft navigation would be far more haphazard, lots of things would fall over inconveniently, virtual reality headsets wouldn’t know when you turned to the left, compasses would, perhaps, rely too much on the Earth’s magnetic field and all manner of apparently gravity-defying fun would be lost to us. Foucault invented them and was also at the forefront of studies into the Earth’s rotation and, for an encore, he discovered eddy currents which explain many a motion-related phenomenon. I imagine that he’d have been pretty proud if he could see, 139 years after his death, the mid-air computer mouse which can move a cursor on a screen just by being pointed at the screen – no mouse mat, no desk – as a result of their containing gyroscopes. A French visionary.

• Henri Giffard – Whilst the word “dirigible” is, these days, often taken simply as meaning “an airship”, in the adjective sense, it means “capable of being directed, controlled or steered”. People had been dangling from big, Hydrogen-filled bags for some time when Giffard added a steam engine, a propeller and a rudder into the blend and, thus, provided the first dirigible, passenger-carrying airships. He also invented a pressure injection system, greatly reducing the moving parts required in earlier versions and, I imagine, a precursor to many later propulsion devices. A French visionary.