and reached an unofficial record speed of 10. 8 kilometers per hour. Quelle acclamation!

As all inventors did, I greatly admired Mr. Alexander Graham Bell. I had named my fast, electric-powered boat Téléphone in his honor. It seems the admiration was mutual, for when he visited me in Paris, he said, “I want to import to America a complete collection of all your inventions, because they constitute for me the highest expression of the perfection and the ingenuity of French electrical science.” He also expressed great surprise that I wasn’t a millionaire many times over like all his colleagues in the United States!

In April 1881, I mounted two battery-powered electric motors on an English-made Coventry Rotary Tricycle. Traveling on the Rue de Valois in Paris at 20 or 25 kilometers per hour (depending upon whom you ask), this vélocipède was the first lightweight electric vehicle. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

While my boats became popular among wealthy patrons for pleasurable outings, they were practical as well.

To control opium trade along China’s coast, the authorities required stealthy surveillance boats. Though electric motors were two or three times more expensive to operate than steam engines, they were silent and always ready. My small, efficient, 30-horsepower dynamo-electric motor launch provided a solution. This boat made possible the interdiction of many millions of francs worth of contraband.

“During my leisure time, I studied architecture, mathematics, chemistry, and physics. But with electricity it was like love at first light.”

locating bullets in wounded soldiers. Later, the Geneva Conference recommended to all European governments that my lighting system for locating wounded soldiers on the battlefield be adopted as standard ambulance equipment.

In the portable telegraph system I devised, the sealed battery withstood all sorts of moving about. It became the most-used portable military telegraph at the time. The Scientific American Supplement in 1882 called the system “perfect.” Others called it “ingenious.” That mattered less than the fact that the combination of snap hooks and cables on spools allowed soldiers to establish lines as long as three kilometers over land and streams in just half an hour.

My shipboard light projector for detecting torpedo boats was presented to the Academy of Sciences in 1885. That same year, my underwater lamps were used in the Suez Canal — and drew international press attention — when they helped divers dynamite a sunken dredger that had interrupted navigation.

While you were making waves with the outboard motor, you were also experimenting with aviation. What were you up to?

Since I drew birds and made bird toys from an early age, it is perhaps not surprising that my flying machines were based on birds. In December 1870, I presented two new models to the Academy.

In my first ornithopter, steam or compressed air activated the wings. The second derived its power from gunpowder charges fired into a tube. Finale-ment, even though mine flew 70 meters, mechanical birds did not figure in the future of aviation.

What prompted you to invent military devices? The terrible days of bloodshed in the 1870 War directed my attention away from pleasant science. My first work for the military involved

Electricity was transformative, and you lit the way in many ways. Tell us about that.

My battery designs made possible portable lamps that were small, maneuverable, and light.

For vehicles, I developed an extremely simple lantern that functioned instantly and provided illumination five to six times superior to oil or candle lanterns. Doctors and others lit their vehicles inside, to do their work, deliver mail, take notes, read, and dispel boredom! Some people, wanting to light their routes or being in need of publicity, used the lamps on the exteriors of their vehicles.

The public named them lampes d’Aladin Trouvé. They burned for about three hours and gave illumination equivalent to four or five candles.

One of my designs enclosed an electric lamp in a double envelope of thick crystal inside a metal

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