Discoveries and Inventions from

18th to 20th century

Automobile - 1769

For historians who think that early steam-powered road vehicles fit the bill, the answer is Nicolas-Joseph

Cugnot, a French military engineer who in 1769 built a steam-powered tricycle for hauling artillery.

The vehicle’s single front wheel performed both steering and driving functions, and it could travel at 2.25 miles per hour with four passengers aboard for

about 15 minutes. At that point Cugnot’ s « fardier à vapeur», as it was

known, would need to rest in order to recuperate enough power to move again.

18th CENTURY

Joseph Montgolfier

Hot-air balloon – 1783The brothers Montgolfier

Joseph and Jacques Etienne Montgolfier were two French brothers who made the first successful hot-air balloon. Their first balloon was launched in December 1782, and ascended to an altitude of 985 ft. (300 m). This type of hot-air balloon was called the Montgolfiere. It was made of paper and used air heated by burning wool and moist straw. The first passengers in a hot-air balloon were a rooster, a sheep, and a duck, whom the Montgolfier brothers sent up to an altitude of 1,640 ft. (500 m) on September 19, 1783. The animals survived the landing.! This event was observed by King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette of France.

Jacques EtienneMontgolfier

The modern parachuteLouis-Sebastien Lenormand-1783

Louis-Sebastien LENORMAND was invented the modern parachute in the late 18th century (the first jump in 1783). Two years later, in 1785, he coined the word "parachute" by hybridizing the prefix para- for "defence or against," and the French word fall (chute), to describe the function of the device. The word literally means "which protects against a fall. " Also the parachute was a security means in order to land a hot air balloon.

18th CENTURY

The metric system - 1790

The metric system was invented in France. In 1790, the French National Assembly directed the Academy of Sciences of Paris to standardize the units of measurement. A committee from the Academy used a decimal system and defined the meter to be one 10-millionths of the distance from the equator to the North Pole). The committee consisted of the mathematicians Jean Charles de Borda (1733-1799), Joseph-Louis Comte de Lagrange (1736-1813), Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827), Gaspard Monge (1746 -1818), and Marie Jean Antoine Nicholas Caritat, the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794).The metric system was passed by law in France on August 1, 1793.The word meter comes from the Greek word metron, which means measure. The centimetre was defined as one-hundredth of a meter. The kilometre was defined as 1000 meters.

18th CENTURY

Marquis de Condorcet

Jean Charles de Borda

LAVOISIER- 1787-”father of the modern chemistry

In collaboration with other contemporary chemists, Lavoisier described a chemical nomenclature published in the book Method of Chemical

Nomenclature (1787). This system is still largely in use today, including names such as sulfuric acid,

sulfates and sulfites.

His Elementary Treatise of Chemistry (1789) is considered the first modern chemical textbook, and

presents a unified view of new theories of chemistry, provides a clear report of the law of conservation of

mass.

18th CENTURY

Braille – 1829

Braille is a coded system of raised dots that are used by the blind to read. Louis Braille (1809-1852) invented this system in 1829. Braille published "The Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Song by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged by Them ».His method is still in use around the world today.

Louis Braille

19th CENTURY

The FRESNEL lens-1822

Fresnel lens was invented by Augustin Fresnel. His challenge was to obtain a sufficiently light lens, but with a large diameter, which allows a short focal length. He solved the problem by cutting the lens in concentric rings, which he joined together. These lenses are aiming to equip

lighthouses and projectors.

Augustin Jean Fresnel

Fresnel lens

19th CENTURY

First vaccine – 1879

Louis Pasteur's first vaccine discovery was in 1879, with a disease called chicken cholera. After accidentally exposing chickens to the attenuated form of a culture, he demonstrated that they became resistant to the actual virus. Pasteur went on to extend his germ theory to develop causes and vaccinations for diseases such as cholera, tuberculosis (TB) and smallpox.

Louis Pasteur

The Stethoscope – 1816

The French physician Rene Laennec invented the stethoscope at a hospital in Paris in 1816.The stethoscope changed how doctors diagnosed diseases. It was one of the first non-lethal instruments allowing doctors to explore internal anatomy.

Rene Laennec

19th CENTURY

The cinematograph of the brothers LUMIERE– 1895The Daguerreotype1839 Louis Lumière and his brother Auguste have

played a major role in the history of cinema.Not that the Lumière brothers had invented then overnight the principle of photographic recording of the movement, nor even the projection screen motion pictures. These techniques have already been approached and experienced by Emile Reynaud and Thomas Edison.

Nicknamed "daguerreotype", this process was to attach the positive image obtained in the camera obscura on a copper plate coated with a silver emulsion and developed with iodine vapor. To obtain for the first time a direct and accurate reproduction of reality, this invention was immediately welcomed by the entire scientific community and cross borders in September 1839 meeting a great success abroad. In France, the impact of the process was such that the State decided to buy the patent to pour it into the public domain.

19th CENTURY

On 19th of August 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre (1787-1851), a Parisian theater designer, divulged the first photographic process.

Assisted by his brother, Louis Lumière did while making their possible exploitation by the use of a perforated film and a single interlocking mechanism. Thus was born the "cinema", the first camera for both the projection and filming movies. It is one of only 5 kilos camera. Their film « Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory » was the first film in the history of film. It was shown in public, the 28 December 1895.

Screencap from Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon

Radiotherapy and the first military field radiological centresPierre and Marie CURIE– 1903

After the physicist Henri Becquerel, who managed to highlight the "spontaneous radiation" of uranium (1896), physicists Marie and Pierre Curie managed to extract uranium ore many elements even

more active, polonium and radium, the origin of this radiation (1898). The "radioactivity" was born.

In 1903, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to Henri Becquerel for "his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity" and the

Curie for their "joint research on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Becquerel".

In 1914 was founded the Radium Institute (Institute Curie). During the First World War, Marie Curie organized the first mobile

radiological service. During the first half of the twentieth century, radium will be mainly used in physics to the study of the structure

of the atomic nucleus and medicine to cure cancer.

20th CENTURY

Marie Skłodowska-Curie

BCG Vaccine – 1921Bacille Calmette-Guérin

The first successful vaccine against tuberculosis was developed at the Pasteur Institute by Albert Calmette and Camille Guerin and announced to the medical community in 1921. In the course of their earlier research they had noted that repeated sub-culturing of the TB bacteria reduced its virulence, so they purposefully set out to decrease virulence through sub-culturing to create vaccine.

After almost fifteen years and 230 transplantations of the bacteria, Calmette and Guerin achieved their goal. By 1921 their test indicated that they had succeeded in producing a non-virulent strain of bacteria and human trials began in France, Germany and Canada!

20th CENTURY

Aqualung – 1943 The aqualung is a breathing apparatus that supplied oxygen to divers and allowed them to stay underwater for several hours. It was invented in 1943 by Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910 -1997) and the French engineer Emile Gagnan. Among the innovations in their device was a mechanism that provided inhalation and exhaust valves at the same level. That summer, the new device was tested in the Mediterranean Sea down to 210 ft. (68 m) by Cousteau, Philippe Tailliez, and Frédérik Dumas. This device was the first modern scuba system.

Jean Yves Cousteau

20th CENTURY

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