Читать книгу Lighthouses - Peter Williams - Страница 18

Compared to Britain, in France a very different picture prevailed, creating the conditions for Brewster’s rival, Fresnel, to become the generally accepted inventor of the lighthouse lens. There, the main reason for the early adoption of new technology in lighthouses using the advances of scientific discovery in optics was the close relationship between the scientific community and government. The age of enlightenment in scientific thought and the growth of industrial process invention in France in the 50 years between 1780 and 1830 have to be set against a backdrop of cultural and political turmoil. The French aristocracy that nurtured many of the leading thinkers was particularly brutalized in the French Revolution. Many intellectuals had to be aware of their political allegiances and take care to remain in favour as the political climate changed. Societies existed since the Renaissance period in France for the promulgation of scientific thought and experimentation. The Académie des Sciences was founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of soldier turned administrator, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who had a plan to create a general academy that would encourage and protect French scientific research. He chose a small group of scholars who held twice-weekly working meetings, the first on 22 December 1666, in the King's library.

While the first 30 years of its existence were relatively informal, in January 1699 Louis XIV gave the Society its first rules, named the group the Royal Academy of Sciences and moved it to more spacious meeting rooms at the Louvre Palace in Paris. The Academy had a leading part in much of the scientific developments in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. With the change to the First Republic in 1793, the National Convention abolished all the academies. On 22 August 1795, a National Institute of Sciences and Arts was formed to amalgamate the old academies of the sciences, literature and arts, among them the Académie Francaise and the Académie des Sciences. Almost all the old members of the previously abolished Académie were formally re-elected and retook their ancient seats. After the Restoration in 1816, the Royal Academy of Sciences became autonomous, but formed part of the all-encompassing Institute of France that had been created in 1795.

In 1794, the education of French engineers was formalized with the founding in Paris of the École Polytechnique by the mathematicians Gaspard Monge and Lazare Carnot; it was probably modelled on Méziers’ military academy where Monge had been a student. The Ecole was given, and still has, the strange nickname ‘X’. A number of such specialized schools, known as grandes écoles, were founded outside the mainstream universities. One, very relevant to the lighthouse story, was the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées. The ‘National School of Bridges and Roads’, often referred to as ‘les Ponts’, is the world’s oldest civil-engineering school and remains to this day one of the most prestigious schools of engineering in the world, with historic buildings in Paris.

The lighthouses of France – as part of the country’s civil engineering infrastructure – came within its orbit, and men of science schooled at les Ponts often became lighthouse administrators working for the government, or acted as scientific advisors to the lighthouse authorities. The French Lighthouse Commission was founded on a determinedly scientific basis when, in 1806, responsibility for the emerging lighthouse estate was transferred from the French Navy to the Ministry of the Interior, where it was placed under the Department of Ponts et Chaussées. The Director, Count Molé, was instrumental in the Commission’s formation in 1811, though it did not become active until the fall of Napoleon. Its aims were stated to be ‘Scientific Experiments in the Effectiveness of Different Light Systems’. The Lighthouse Commission acted as permanent scientific advisors to the French Lighthouse Service, the Société Nationale pour Le Patrimoine des Phares et Balises (National Society for the Heritage of Lighthouses and Beacons). Though over the years the Commission’s composition was varied, it was essentially made up of three scientific advisers, three Inspectors from Phares et Balises and three senior officers from the French Navy.

Thus by 1806 a direct and official link was established between the French scientific community and the lighthouse authorities. The English lighthouse Royal Commission, by contrast, was formed more than 50 years later, with one just scientist, the chemist Dr Gladstone, appointed as a commissioner, and it only sat for just over two years before being disbanded. In the intervening years, between 1806 and 1858, there was a single trajectory towards the systematic application of new lighthouse illumination technology in France and some other European countries, while in Britain and the United States scepticism, prevarication and over-emphasis on cost savings led to a comparative state of backwardness, which became an official embarrassment in both countries.