Maker

No sense in frightening the patient — or the neighbors — with the sight of a strange new medical apparatus!

LIGHT WHERE YOU NEED IT: Underwater lighting with an electric lamp by Trouvé; interior view of his fire-safe universal electric safety lamp.

Wasn’t there a dispute about who was first?

My polyscope caused a revolution in medicine when it appeared at the World Exposition of 1873 in Vienna. I was awarded the Medal of Progress.

Malheureusement, two foreigners — a physician and a manufacturer — claimed as new inventions things that were merely modifications of my ideas.

I told my wife with a smile, “My dear love, I am redeemed: my invention is good, I have a counterfeiter!’”

Luckily, I encountered eloquent defenders, and in spite of the two German counterfeiters, the use of my electric polyscopes entered medical practice definitively.

In the 21st century, we’re getting serious about electric vehicles. You pioneered two? Using electromagnets, I made dynamo-electric motors. I patented a 5-kilogram motor and envisaged two such motors, each directly driving

a paddle wheel on either side of a boat’s hull. Then I progressed to a multi-bladed propeller.

In July 1880, I submitted to the Academy of Sciences a new motor based on the eccen-trization of the Siemens coil. In 1881, I reported that through numerous modifications I had reduced the weight of all the components and thus obtained remarkable output. The motor was removable and easily lifted off the boat.

On the 26th of May 1881, my outboard motor, with two potassium-bichromate batteries and a three-bladed propeller, powered an 18-foot-long boat down the Seine and back from Pont Royal.

Soon after, I repeated this experiment on the calm upper lake of the Bois de Boulogne, with a four-bladed propeller and a battery charged with one part hydrochloric acid, one part nitric acid, and two parts water so as to lessen the emission of nitrous fumes.

Without noise or smoke, my boat beat all others

34 Make: Volume 17