Who was Louis Guillaume PERREAUX, the inventor of the motorcycle?
A kid from Normandy invents the cane-rifle and changes his life
Louis Guillaume Perreaux was born on February 19, 1819 in Almenêches, a small village in the Orne department, where his family had been established for several centuries. His parents weren't wealthy, his father was a turner, and if he hadn't invented the cane-rifle at the age of 16, young Louis-Guillaume would probably have stayed in the same house, the same commune, and probably continued his father's trade. It was this invention, which incidentally helped improve the French army's rifles, that got him noticed by important people (stud farms and châteaux are plentiful in this pretty corner of Normandy) who would have protected him and even pushed him to continue. In any case, it was an already brilliant mind who left his small village to study at the Arts et Metiers school in Châlons sur Marne. A state scholarship, obtained through his intelligence, enabled him not to pay for his studies and to have the bare minimum. You can imagine the heartbreak for the family, as it took a week to get there from the family home. Little did anyone know that he would become famous in his own time, inspiring Jules Verne to create a Mr. Perreaux inventor in the novel "Robur le Conquérant";
The village of Almenêches is located near Argentan, in the Orne region of Normandy. Photo chosen by monsieurdefrance.com: By Romain Bréget - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36711809
A whole series of inventions
Engineer before his time, Louis Guillaume truly spent his life inventing, from the age of 16 until the last days of his life, before dying in Paris on April 5, 1889. He was responsible for a host of devices and ideas, not all of which were patented (this was in the early days of idea protection). In particular, he invented:
- One of the first submarines(tested on the Seine in Paris in 1842) which ran on compressed air.
- A gun, the Perreaux flap gun (in 1864).
- The spherometer with feet
- The wool whitener.
- The pulsograph.
and more than 30 inventions as diverse as they are varied.
Invention of the motorcycle in 1869
The description of the motorcycle in Louis Guillaume PERREAUX's patent / Illustration chosen by monsieurdefrance.Com: By James Titus Allen - https://books.google.com/books?id=o-JLAAAAYAAJ, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12852516
On March 16, 1869, he patented the "high-speed velocipede". The bicycle had been around for a few years (pedals were a French invention, by the way) and he was the first to come up with the idea of putting a motor on a two-wheeler. It's a steam engine powered by a small boiler. The first motorcycle was created in 1873. It was his invention that inspired Maybar and Daimler to invent, later, the same thing but with an internal combustion engine, the motorcycle as we know it.
Louis Guillaume PERREAUX: inventor, painter and even writer
Such a brain didn't "just" imagine machines. He also wrote. We owe him in particular"ode à ma mère" a little book he peppered with opinions on the working-class condition, on how to live together, and in which we sense what love he had for this mother he had to leave so young to make his own life. In 1877, he also published "Lois de l'univers, principe de la création", a book that mixes philosophy and science, quite astonishing, but which didn't work at all at the time. He also loved to paint. We have no portrait of him, probably because he didn't like to be portrayed. He was, in fact, struck by smallpox as a child, which left many scars on his face.
In short, a fertile mind, who has come a long way since his native Normandy, who has been forgotten, and that's a shame, because without him, motorcyclists might have experienced the pleasure of motorcycling much later in history.
