French engineer stubs

Alain_Glavieux

Alain Glavieux (French: [alɛ̃ ɡlavjø]; 4 July 1949, Paris – 25 September 2004) was a French professor in electrical engineering at École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne. He was the coinventor with Claude Berrou and Punya Thitimajshima of a groundbreaking coding scheme called turbo codes.
Glavieux received the Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society together with Berrou and Thitimajshima in 1998, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal together with Berrou in 2003, and the French Academy of Sciences Grand Prix France Telecom award in 2003.
He died on 25 September 2004 at the age of 55 from illness.

Benoît_Fourneyron

Benoît Fourneyron (31 October 1802 – 31 July 1867) was a French engineer, born in Saint-Étienne, Loire. Fourneyron made significant contributions to the development of water turbines.
Benoît Fourneyron was educated at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne, a nearby engineering school that had recently opened. After he graduated in 1816, he spent the next few years in mines and ironworks.
Around this time, a number of French engineers—including some of Fourneyron's former teachers—were starting to apply the mathematical techniques of modern science to the ancient mechanism called the waterwheel.
For centuries, waterwheels had been used to convert the energy of streams into mechanical power, mostly for milling grain. But the new machines of the Industrial Revolution required more power, and by the 1820s there was enormous interest in making waterwheels more efficient.

Louis_Mekarski

Louis Mékarski (in Polish Ludwik Mękarski) (1843, Clermont-Ferrand, France – 1923) was a French engineer and inventor of Polish origin. In the 1870s he invented the so-called Mekarski system of compressed-air powered trams which was used in several cities of France and USA as alternative to horse-powered and steam-powered trams.

Yvon_Villarceau

Antoine-Joseph Yvon Villarceau (15 January 1813 – 23 December 1883) was a French astronomer, mathematician, and engineer.
He constructed an equatorial meridian-instrument and an isochronometric regulator for the Paris Observatory.
He wrote Mécanique Céleste. Expose des Méthodes de Wronski et Composantes des Forces Perturbatrices suivant les Axes Mobiles (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1881) and Sur l'établissement des arches de pont, envisagé au point de vue de la plus grande stabilité (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1853).
He is the eponym of Villarceau circles, which are two circular sections of a torus other than the two trivial ones.
A short street in the 16th arrondissement of Paris is named after Villarceau.

Henri_Fabre

Henri Fabre (29 November 1882 – 30 June 1984) was a French aviator and the inventor of the first successful seaplane, the Fabre Hydravion.Henri Fabre was born into a prominent family of shipowners in the city of Marseille. He was educated in the Jesuit College of Marseilles where he undertook advanced studies in sciences.
He intensively studied aeroplane and propeller designs. He patented a system of flotation devices which he used when he succeeded in taking off from the surface of the Etang de Berre on 28 March 1910. On that day, he completed four consecutive flights, the longest about 600 metres. the Hydravion has survived and is displayed in the Musée de l'Air in Paris. Henri Fabre was soon contacted by Glenn Curtiss and Gabriel Voisin who used his invention to develop their own seaplanes.
As late as 1971, Fabre said he was still sailing his own boat single-handedly in Marseille harbour.He died at the age of 101 as one of the last living pioneers of human flight.

Jacques_Antoine_Charles_Bresse

Jacques Antoine Charles Bresse (9 October 1822, in Vienne, Isère – 22 May 1883) was a French civil engineer who specialized in the design and use of hydraulic motors.
Bresse graduated from the École Polytechnique in 1843 and received his formal education in engineering at the École des Ponts et Chaussées. He returned to the École des Ponts et Chaussées in 1848 as an instructor for applied mechanics courses and in 1853 gained his professorship in applied mechanics, after which he taught at the school until his death in 1883.His name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.

Hilaire_de_Chardonnet

Louis-Marie Hilaire Bernigaud de Grange, Count (Comte) de Chardonnet (1 May 1839 – 11 March 1924) was a French engineer and industrialist from Besançon, and inventor of artificial silk.
In the late 1870s, Chardonnet was working with Louis Pasteur on a remedy to the epidemic that was destroying French silkworms. Failure to clean up a spill in the darkroom resulted in Chardonnet's discovery of nitrocellulose as a potential replacement for real silk. Realizing the value of such a discovery, Chardonnet began to develop his new product.He called his new invention "Chardonnet silk" (soie de Chardonnet) and displayed it in the Paris Exhibition of 1889. Unfortunately, Chardonnet's material was extremely flammable, and was subsequently replaced with other, more stable materials.
He was the first to patent artificial silk, although Georges Audemars had invented a variety called rayon in 1855.