the man who had a date with the sun
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“The Inventor”, by Miguel Bonnefoy, Rivages, 208 p., €19.50, digital €15.
Like an alert, placed on a bedside table, a simple word cautiously scribbled from childhood by a livid kid, “gloomy mummy” fearing that his sleep will be misinterpreted and lead to him being buried alive: “Although I look like it, I am not dead. »
Is it because he heard this painful plea that Miguel Bonnefoy wanted, in The Inventorbring life to this child who only disappeared at the age of 87 but saw his memory, well before his death, sink into deep oblivion?
The inventor was Augustin Mouchot (1825-1912), the last-born of a locksmith from Semur-en-Auxois (Côte-d’Or) who, too weak for craftsmanship, first taught as a teacher then math teacher. From his birth overwhelmed by all ills, subject to a “storm of infections”, this sickly being, nearly killed by sunstroke at the age of 3, has a passion for the Sun. When he discovered in Alençon, in the library of a Crimean hero colonel whose lease he took over, the story of the Genevan physicist and naturalist Horace Bénédict de Saussure (1740-1799), who developed a “heliothermometer” to cook his meals at the top of the Alps, his life changes. Devoting himself ardently to the mastery of solar energy, he went from failure to disillusion until, fortuitously, one of his prototypes reacted.
Here he filed, in March 1861, the patent for his “heliopump” – a parabolic reflector flanked by a cylindrical glass boiler – but each public demonstration turned into a fiasco. However, even at a time when the subsoil and the coal it contains are essential, its solar challenge is of interest. With each setback that sends Augustin Mouchot back to his darkness, a miracle puts him back in the saddle.
hour of glory
An artillery general believed in him, took him for a scholar of genius and recommended him to Napoleon III. Yet triumphantly presented in Biarritz, “Octave” – the machine owes its name to the man who was thus named before becoming the Roman Emperor Augustus, and whose beauty was said to eclipse the very sun – nor its inventor impose themselves on the world . New challenge, new torments. Also the cycle of successes and setbacks does not stop. And if, on the sidelines of a politico-military history that indifferent to him, Mouchot ended up experiencing his hour of glory during the Universal Exhibition of 1878, he pursued his dream of meeting the Sun as close as possible, at the top of the Mont Chélia, in the Aurès, in Algeria, for the “finger touch”.
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