Notable : Famous : Founder/ originator

Benoît Rouquayrol (1826–1875) was a French inventor. Along with Auguste Denayrouze, Rouquayrol invented a diving suit and breathing apparatus.

Charles-Joseph Pigeon (29 March 1838 – 18 March 1915) was born in Le Mesnil-Lieubray in Normandy in France.
He started as a salesman in Le Bon Marché in Paris, where he became a close friend of Ernest Cognacq, subsequently the founder of the Samaritaine department store.
Pigeon became a dealer in cycle lamps and other lamps. His invention and manufacture of the Pigeon lamp, a non-exploding gasoline lamp, in 1884 (exhibited at the Exposition universelle de 1900), made him famous and wealthy.

After his death he remains noted for his family grave in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, which he commissioned in 1905 to hold up to 18 family members. The main feature is a life-sized bronze sculpture of Pigeon (notebook and pencil in hand) and his wife lying on a bed, overlooked by an angel, which had been illuminated by a lamp for many years by his custodians.

Paul Marie Oudin (1851–1923) was a French physician and medical researcher. He was born, and later died, in Épinal. He conducted research in the Victorian era medical field of high frequency electrotherapy, the application of radio frequency electric currents to the body, and collaborated with the founder of the field, pioneering physiologist and biophysicist Dr. Jacques Arsene d'Arsonval. In 1893 he modified d'Arsonval's electrotherapy equipment by the addition of a wire coil resonator to produce higher potentials, inventing the Oudin coil. This device, very similar to a Tesla coil, could produce very high voltages from several hundred thousand to a million volts. In use, the brush discharges from a pointed electrode attached to the high voltage terminal of the coil would be played over various parts of the body to treat a variety of medical conditions. The Oudin coil was used in electrotherapy and diathermy through the 1920s.

Claude Félix Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor (26 July 1805, Saint-Cyr, Saône-et-Loire – 7 April 1870, Paris) was a French photographic inventor. Claude was an army lieutenant and the cousin of Nicéphore Niépce. He first experimented in 1847 with negatives made with albumen on glass, a method subsequently used by Frederick Langenheim for his and his brother’s lantern slides. At his laboratory near Paris, Saint-Victor worked on the fixation of natural photographic colour as well as the perfection of his cousin's heliographing process for photomechanical printing. His method of photomechanical printing, called heliogravure, was published in 1856 in Traité pratique de gravure héliographique. In the 1850s, he also published frequently in La Lumière.

Augustin Mouchot (; French: [muʃo]; 7 April 1825 – 4 October 1912) was a 19th-century French inventor of the earliest solar-powered engine, converting solar energy into mechanical steam power.

Pierre-Émile Martin (French: [pjɛʁ emil maʁtɛ̃]; 18 August 1824, Bourges, Cher – 23 May 1915, Fourchambault) was a French industrial engineer. He applied the principle of recovery of the hot gas in an open hearth furnace, a process invented by Carl Wilhelm Siemens.
In 1865, based on the Siemens process, he implemented the process which bears his name for producing steel in a hearth by remelting scrap steel with the addition of cast iron for the dilution of impurities.
His work earned him the award of the Bessemer Gold Medal of the Iron and Steel Institute in 1915 and of the French nation (knight in 1878 then Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1910).

Alphonse Loubat (15 June 1799 – 10 September 1866) was a French inventor who developed improvements in tram and rail equipment, and helped develop tram lines in New York City and Paris.
Loubat was born in Sainte-Livrade-sur-Lot. He went to New York City in 1827 where he helped develop that city's first tramway in 1832. He returned to France and in 1852 developed the grooved rail, which greatly facilitated street railways and tramlines. Besides he planted wine in Brooklin and wrote on wine.He died in Ville-d'Avray. Joseph Florimond Loubat was his son.

René Lorin (24 March 1877 – 16 January 1933) was a French aerospace engineer and inventor of the ramjet.In 1908 Lorin patented, FR390256, the first subsonic ramjet design. He published the principles of a ramjet in articles in the journal L'Aérophile from 1908 to 1913, expressing the idea that the exhaust from internal combustion engines could be directed into nozzles to create jet propulsion. He could not test this invention since there was no way at the time for an aircraft to go fast enough for a ramjet to function properly.When René Leduc applied for a patent on a ramjet design in 1933, FR705648, he discovered Lorin's publications and tried to contact him, only to learn that he had recently died. Leduc thereafter paid homage to Lorin's work.René Lorin is a graduate of the École Centrale Paris.