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A feeble-minded inventor.

Case 38. (Laignel-Lavastine and Ballet, 1917.)

A jockey of Nîmes, 31, entered the service May 15, 1917. He retired before the war. He was in the auxiliaries at the moment of mobilization. Nothing is known as to any pathological episodes in his past. He said he had been a poor scholar, had left the primary school at eleven hardly knowing how to write or spell, but he had a lively imagination and was a happy-go-lucky youth, playing many tricks on the trades people. He tried a variety of ideas in the industrial or commercial world with very varying success. He had a mechanical taste. The Colonial Exposition at Marseilles caused him to float a variety of projects, from that of having the visitors photographed on a camel to the sale of lemonade. He said he had been a jockey and then a trainer and had finally become a valet de jockey at Maisons Laffitte. He was a gambler and invented a “system.” He made various inventions in relation to horses. At the end of 1914 he had plans for a bomb thrower and placed his discovery at the service of the War Minister. He was not discouraged by the lack of success of the bomb thrower. He now made an aerial torpedo carrier. He had the idea of the tanks. However, he found the secret of his torpedo carrier printed in a magazine. There was a slight difference between the German apparatus and his own.

From this time he began to be mistrustful, and now he jealously avoided entering into any details about his inventions and he did not let his officers see his plans. The Commandant offered to give a place in the safe to his documents, but he could not embrace the offer. He now invented a counter-torpedo machine. He went on leave to Paris, asked an audience of the Minister of Marine, who put him in relation to the Committee on Inventions, who put him off, desiring that he should forward all his plans. He emerged from one of his interviews so excited that there was a scandal on the public street and the police commissary evacuated him to Val-de-Grâce, but the patient says he does not remember this incident. He came on service of Laignel-Lavastine May 15. He shortly wrote again to the Minister, who again referred him to the Committee on Inventions. He protested to the President of the Republic and wrote directly to the King of England, who referred him to the Military Administration. He is now occupied in creating a machine to destroy the first line trenches and continues to write to the Ministry. He has documents buried underground in a secret place. He still talks with great vivacity of his discoveries.

According to Laignel-Lavastine, we deal with a feeble-minded person who has for many years had a délire raisonnant of the inventing group.

Re feeblemindedness in the British Army, Shuttleworth found 70 who had joined from special schools for the feeble-minded in London, and 100 from Birmingham in the year 1915. The institutional “children” were in general good at drilling and obeying. One of them, given to lying and stealing, got into constant trouble in Flanders.

Sir George Savage stated that he had sometimes run the risk of allowing enlistment of men who had shown earlier in life a weakness for lying and pilfering, and remarked that such men might make good soldiers. A case like the above (38) would run counter to this view. On this matter, see below Case 183 (Henderson), one of pathological lying.