Besançon

Besancon, Francia.

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Auguste and his brother Louis Lumière (b. 5 October 1864 Besançon, France; d. 6 June 1948 Bandol, France) developed the photographic plate-making business founded by their father, Charles Antoine Lumière, at Lyons, extending production to roll-film manufacture in 1887. In the summer of 1894 their father brought to the factory a piece of Edison kinetoscope film, and said that they should produce films for the French owners of the new moving-picture machine. To do this, of course, a camera was needed; Louis was chiefly responsible for the design, which used an intermittent claw for driving the film, inspired by a sewing-machine mechanism. The machine was patented on 13 February 1895, and it was shown on 22 March 1895 at the Société d'Encouragement pour l'In-dustrie Nationale in Paris, with a projected film showing workers leaving the Lyons factory. Further demonstrations followed at the Sorbonne, and in Lyons during the Congrès des Sociétés de Photographie in June 1895. The Lumières filmed the delegates returning from an excursion, and showed the film to the Congrès the next day. To bring the Cinématographe, as it was called, to the public, the basement of the Grand Café in the Boulevard des Capuchines in Paris was rented, and on Saturday 28 December 1895 the first regular presentations of projected pictures to a paying public took place. The half-hour shows were an immediate success, and in a few months Lumière Cinématographes were seen throughout the world.

The other principal area of achievement by the Lumière brothers was colour photography. They took up Lippman's method of interference colour photography, developing special grainless emulsions, and early in 1893 demonstrated their results by lighting them with an arc lamp and projecting them on to a screen. In 1895 they patented a method of subtractive colour photography involving printing the colour separations on bichromated gelatine glue sheets, which were then dyed and assembled in register, on paper for prints or bound between glass for transparencies. Their most successful colour process was based upon the colour-mosaic principle. In 1904 they described a process in which microscopic grains of potato starch, dyed red, green and blue, were scattered on a freshly varnished glass plate. When dried the mosaic was coated with varnish and then with a panchromatic emulsion. The plate was exposed with the mosaic towards the lens, and after reversal processing a colour transparency was produced. The process was launched commercially in 1907 under the name Autochrome; it was the first fully practical single-plate colour process to reach the public, remaining on the market until the 1930s, when it was followed by a film version using the same principle.

Auguste and Louis received the Progress Medal of the Royal Photographic Society in 1909 for their work in colour photography. Auguste was also much involved in biological science and, having founded the Clinique Auguste Lumière, spent many of his later years working in the physiological laboratory.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Orphaned when his parents died of cholera, at the age of 14 he was taken by his elder sister to live in Marcilly-le-Hayer. Apprenticed to a joiner, he was also interested in chemistry and physics, but his great love was drawing and painting. The leading water-colourist Auguste Constantin took him into his Paris home as an apprentice and taught him the whole business of painting. He was able to earn his living as a sign-painter, and numbered among his clients several photographers. This led to an interest in photography, which caused him to abandon the safe trade of sign-painter for that of photographer.

Lumière took a post with a photographer in Besançon in 1862. He set up business on his own account in 1865 and moved to Lyons c.1870, joining his friend and fellow photographer Emile Lebeau. The business prospered; in 1879 he installed an electricity generator in his studio to run the newly invented Van de Weyde electric arc lamp, permitting portraiture in all weathers and at all times. With the arrival of the dry-plate process c. 1880, the Lumière business looked to employ the new medium. His second son, Louis Lumière (b. 5 October 1864 Besançon, France; d. 6 June 1948 Bandol, France; see under Lumière, Auguste), fresh from college, experimented with emulsions with which his 12-year-old sister coated glass plates. While still running the studio, Antoine started marketing the plates, which were the first to be made in France, and production was soon up to 4,000 plates a day. Under his guidance A.Lumière et ses Fils acquired a worldwide reputation for the quality and originality of its products.

After his retirement from business, when he handed it over to his sons, Auguste (see Lumière, Auguste) and Louis, he took up painting again and successfully exhibited in several Salons. He was a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, a recognition of his participation in the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago.

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Occasionally the gender of a town is clear because the name includes the definite article, e.g. Le Havre or La Rochelle. In most other cases, there is some hesitation, and it is always safer to avoid the problem by using la ville de:

= la ville de Toulouse est belle

For in and to with the name of a town, use à in French ; if the French name includes the definite article, à will become au, à la, à l’ or aux:

= vivre à Toulouse

= aller à Toulouse

= vivre au Havre

= aller au Havre

= vivre à La Rochelle

= aller à La Rochelle

= vivre aux Arcs

= aller aux Arcs

Similarly, from is de, becoming du, de la, de l’ or des when it combines with the definite article in town names:

= venir de Toulouse

= venir du Havre

= venir de La Rochelle

= venir des Arcs

English sometimes has specific words for people of a certain city or town, such as Londoners, New Yorkers or Parisians, but mostly we talk of the people of Leeds or the inhabitants of San Francisco. On the other hand, most towns in French-speaking countries have a corresponding adjective and noun, and a list of the best-known of these is given at the end of this note.

The noun forms, spelt with a capital letter, mean a person from X:

= les Bordelais mpl

= les Strasbourgeois mpl

= les magasins parisiens

However, some of these French words are fairly rare, and it is always safe to say les habitants de X, or, for the adjective, simply de X. Here are examples of this, using some of the nouns that commonly combine with the names of towns:

= un accent de Bordeaux

= l’aéroport de Toulouse

= la région de La Rochelle

= les autobus de Limoges

= le conseil municipal du Havre

= les représentants de Lille

= les restaurants des Arcs

= la route de Genève

= les rues de Bruxelles

= l’équipe d’Angers

= le train d’Avignon

= la circulation à Orléans

Remember that when these adjectives are used as nouns, meaning a person from X or the people of X, they are spelt with capital letters.

Aix-en-Provence = aixois(e)

Alger = algérois(e)

Angers = angevin(e)

Arles = arlésien(ne)

Auxerre = auxerrois(e)

Avignon = avignonnais(e)

Bastia = bastiais(e)

Bayonne = bayonnais(e)

Belfort = belfortain(e)

Berne = bernois(e)

Besançon = bisontin(e)

Béziers = biterrois(e)

Biarritz = biarrot(e)

Bordeaux = bordelais(e)

Boulogne-sur-Mer = boulonnais(e)

Bourges = berruyer(-ère)

Brest = brestois(e)

Bruges = brugeois(e)

Bruxelles = bruxellois(e)

Calais = calaisien(ne)

Cannes = cannais(e)

Carcassonne = carcassonnais(e)

Chambéry = chambérien(ne)

Chamonix = chamoniard(e)

Clermont-Ferrand = clermontois(e)

Die = diois(e)

Dieppe = dieppois(e)

Dijon = dijonnais(e)

Dunkerque = dunkerquois(e)

Fontainebleau = bellifontain(e)

Gap = gapençais(e)

Genève = genevois(e)

Grenoble = grenoblois(e)

Havre, Le = havrais(e)

Lens = lensois(e)

Liège = liégeois(e)

Lille = lillois(e)

Lourdes = lourdais(e)

Luxembourg = luxembourgeois(e)

Lyon = lyonnais(e)

Mâcon = mâconnais(e)

Marseille = marseillais(e) or phocéen(ne)

Metz = messin(e)

Modane = modanais(e)

Montpellier = montpelliérain(e)

Montréal = montréalais(e)

Moulins = moulinois(e)

Mulhouse = mulhousien(ne)

Nancy = nancéien(ne)

Nantes = nantais(e)

Narbonne = narbonnais(e)

Nevers = nivernais(e)

Nice = niçois(e)

Nîmes = nîmois(e)

Orléans = orléanais(e)

Paris = parisien(ne)

Pau = palois(e)

Périgueux = périgourdin(e)

Perpignan = perpignanais(e)

Poitiers = poitevin(e)

Pont-à-Mousson = mussipontain(e)

Québec = québécois(e)

Reims = rémois(e)

Rennes = rennais(e)

Roanne = roannais(e)

Rouen = rouennais(e)

Saint-Étienne = stéphanois(e)

Saint-Malo = malouin(e)

Saint-Tropez = tropézien(ne)

Sancerre = sancerrois(e)

Sète = sétois(e)

Sochaux = sochalien(ne)

Strasbourg = strasbourgeois(e)

Tarascon = tarasconnais(e)

Tarbes = tarbais(e)

Toulon = toulonnais(e)

Toulouse = toulousain(e)

Tours = tourangeau(-elle)

Tunis = tunisois(e)

Valence = valentinois(e)

Valenciennes = valenciennois(e)

Versailles = versaillais(e)

Vichy = vichyssois(e)

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Deville was the son of a prosperous shipowner with diplomatic duties in the Virgin Islands. With his elder brother Charles, who later became a distinguished physicist, he was sent to Paris to be educated. He took his degree in medicine in 1843, but before that he had shown an interest in chemistry, due particularly to the lectures of Thenard. Two years later, with Thenard's influence, he was appointed Professor of Chemistry at Besançon. In 1851 he was able to return to Paris as Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He remained there for the rest of his working life, greatly improving the standard of teaching, and his laboratory became one of the great research centres of Europe. His first chemical work had been in organic chemistry, but he then turned to inorganic chemistry, specifically to improve methods of producing the new and little-known metal aluminium. Essentially, the process consisted of forming sodium aluminium trichloride and reducing it with sodium to metallic aluminium. He obtained sodium in sufficient quantity by reducing sodium carbonate with carbon. In 1855 he exhibited specimens of the metal at the Paris Exhibition, and the same year Napoleon III asked to see them, with a view to using it for breastplates for the Army and for spoons and forks for State banquets. With the resulting government support, he set up a pilot plant at Jarvel to develop the process, and then set up a small company, the Société d'Aluminium at Nan terre. This raised the output of this attractive and useful metal, so it could be used more widely than for the jewellery to which it had hitherto been restricted. Large-scale applications, however, had to await the electrolytic process that began to supersede Deville's in the 1890s. Deville extended his sodium reduction method to produce silicon, boron and the light metals magnesium and titanium. His investigations into the metallurgy of platinum revolutionized the industry and led in 1872 to his being asked to make the platinum-iridium (90–10) alloy for the standard kilogram and metre. Deville later carried out important work in high-temperature chemistry. He grieved much at the death of his brother Charles in 1876, and his retirement was forced by declining health in 1880; he did not survive for long.

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