Three from Lyon

   340  
Three from Lyon
The city of Lyon has something for every taste. It is modern but retains its older, well maintained sections. It is filled with churches, museums and parks. Some of the best restaurants in France are found here as well as chocolates and pastries. The museums are first class, especially the Museum of The Resistance. Two great rivers, the Soane and the Rhone meet here. But most importantly, there are stories of famous men in Lyon and today I turn to three of the. What do the Lumiere Brothers (Auguste & Louis), Andre-Marie Ampier and Antoine de St Exupery have in common? Answer: They were all born or created what they did in or near Lyon, France. Each was famous in his own way. One was a famous writer and aviator who wrote The Little Prince, among other things. The brothers Lumiere mass produced the first cinema cameras in France and made movies that were shown in Paris in the 1890s. The third gave his name to the electric current, one of the discoveries of electromagnetism. The center of Lyons is Place Belgrade. At one end is a delicate statue showing Antoine de St Exupery, the pilot, seated on a tall pedicle with the little prince standing behind him. While the author lived in many places, as he was a flyer and spy as well as a world traveler, he is really connected with Lyon. It surprised me to discover that he lived in Quebec City for a short time in 1942. St-Exupery was born into a family of nobility. The turning point in his life came when he failed his final exam at a university preparatory school. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to study architecture. But everything changed when he entered military service where he trained as a pilot. It was then that he started to write. By 1931 he married a widow whose friends included Maurice Meterlinck. His wife later wrote, “He wasn’t like other people, but like a child or angel who has fallen…from the sky”. His air exploits and travels are legendary but his writing made him world famous. The Little Prince is the third most popular book ever written, outnumbered only by The Bible and Karl Mark’s Das Kapital. Exupery’s fable for adults has been translated into 150 languages. He suffered a number of flying accidents but was still flying during WWII. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre. His other books include Flight to Arras, published in New York in 1942. It depicts a hopeless flight over enemy lines when France was already beaten. The book was banned in France by the German authorities. Wind, Sand and Stars appeared in 1939 and won him the French Academy’s Grand Prix du Roman and the National Book Award in New York. His plane disappeared in the Mediterranean Sea on a flight from Corsica in 1944. Fragments of his plane can be seen at Le Bourget Museum of Air and Space. Lyon Airport is now named St-Exupery International. His 1939 writing Terre des Hommes inspired Montreal’s World’s Fair Expo ’67 to be called Man and His World. It says something about the people of Lyon that the city fathers should erect a statue to St-Exupery’s memory. Others who brought fame to Lyon were the Lumiere Brothers. They mass produced cinema cameras and brought the first moving pictures to France. One of their first cameras recently sold at an auction for $80,000. In a city that was the capital of the silk trade, Auguste and Louis Lumiere built a factory that created not only cameras but their famous blue dry plates which enabled photography and cinematography to flourish. The first public film event was held during the 1900 Paris Exposition which was projected on a screen 99 X 79 feet in size. Their work on color photography (Autochrome) became the preferred method of creating colored prints through the 1930s. Their inventions led to Edison’s 1889 creation of the kinetograph to make motion pictures. Edison created a “peep box” for single people to watch a moving image but the Lumiere Brothers found a way to project motion picture images for a large audience. The Lyon house and museum is open to the public and you can see the first moving pictures created by the brothers in the nineteenth century Andre-Marie Ampere (1775-1836) as a self taught scientist who gave us what we now call the Ampere. This physics principle is part of the study of electromagnetism. It is a way to measure the flow of an electrical courant. It helped lay the foundation of physics, which is remarkable if you know that Ampere never attended formal schools. He was mostly taught and inspired by the teachings of his father, a Justice of the Peace in Lyon during the French Revolution. But his father was sent to the guillotine and Andre was crushed. He gave up teaching for 18 months. He was also a voracious reader and he carried with him the knowledge gained from the encyclopedia for the rest of his life. He learned calculus from a neighborhood monk. The family had a home just outside of Lyon but divided their time between the country and city. The country home in Poleymieux au-Mont d’Or, now part of greater Lyon, 10 Km from Lyon is now a museum. Eventually, Ampere began teaching Physics at the Lycee in Lyon and in Bourg-en-Bresse. Later he taught physics and Chemistry and read widely in the fields of history, travel, poetry, philosophy and Natural Science. He died in Marseilles but was buried in Montmartre Cemetery…
  • SUBSCRIBE
  • ALREADY SUBSCRIBED?
Previous Article Carla Bruni
Next Article Playing Tourist in your own City