Great Inventors- Changing The World

From flight to films, French minds have been at the forefront of innovation, says Sandra Haurant

- Sandra Haurant

France has always loved to innovate, create and invent in every field, from arts and culture to the sciences. So it is perhaps not surprising that so many vital objects, machines and solutions which we take for granted were first dreamed up in the minds of an ingenious, daring, or indeed maverick French man or woman.

Take those early pioneers of flight, the Montgolfier brothers Joseph-Michel (1740-1810) and Jacques-Étienne (1745-1799). They helped to run the family paper factory business near Annonay in Ardèche, where they noticed that heated air beneath a lightweight paper or fabric bag allowed the bag to float. A series of hot-air balloon experiments culminated in the first manned untethered flight on 21 November 1783, when Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes flew for around 20 minutes over Paris and made the dream of human flight a reality.