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Nom
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Regnier Edmé
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Date de naissance
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15 June 1751
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Date de mort
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10 June 1825
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Lieu de naissance
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Sémur-en-Auxois
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Lieu de mort
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Paris
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Couverture temporelle
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Late 18th/early 19th century
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Couverture spatiale
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Semur-en-Auxois ; Paris
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Biographie
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The son of a lock-smith, Regnier was a student at the Collège de Sémur when the death of his father, leaving his widow with eleven children (Edmé was the eldest son), forced the abandonment of liberal studies and the beginning of apprenticeship to a gun-smith in Dijon. Here Regnier also attended a drawing school and carried out his own experiments on explosive powders. These, and his being awarded a First prize in his drawing school drew the attention of the Prince de Condé to him. Established as a gun-smith and general mechanician in Sémur, c. 1772, in 1777 he was awarded a prize by the Société d'Emulation for a combination lock having twenty-four positions on any one of three rings, later increased to four or five. Regnier, in 1784, obtained a brevet as ‘Mécanicien des Provinces de Bourgogne et de M. le Duc de Chartres’, a direct result of his development of a machine for drawing and cabling supple iron wire which he then adapted for use with lightening conductors. During this period Regnier also encountered Buffon for whom, and for Guéneau de Montbeliard, who probably introduced them, he devised his ‘dynamometer’, an instrument for measuring exerted force, whether by men, animals or machines. It was also for Buffon that in 1786 Regnier designed an optical meridian dial with an aural signal for the kiosque erected by Edmé Verniquet in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris. This was a model that he had already installed in his native town, and which he had sought to commercialise through sale by subscription at a price of 96 livres. About 1806, he devised an improved version of Rousseau's 'noon-gun' which was commercialised by the optician Häring, and in 1818 another version that played music.
With the Revolution, Regnier moved to Paris where, thanks to the support of his countryman Carnot, he was appointed to the Administration Générale des Armes portatives’, and as Director of the Central Repository of Artillery was the de facto founder of the Arms Museum, kernel of the later Army Museum (1871). As an inventor he is best known as the maker/retailer of the dynamometer (1) to which he gave various applications. At the 1819 exhibition he showed it adapted to a self-registering anemometer, one such instrument having been ordered by the Board of Longitudes for the Observatory. (2) Other applications were to measure the force of flowing river water, and that required for the springs of pistols; Among his other inventions were devices related to guns and several horticultural improvements such as thermometers for hot-beds, secateurs, fruit-picking implements, and vine pinchers. He also developed wheel-chairs, extending ladders for fire-fighting and therapeutic magnetised metal bracelets. He was an active memeber of the Société d'Encouragement writng numerous reports on the inventioins submitted to it. (3)
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Notes biographiques
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1 On which see the memoir by his son, J. B. Regnier, 'Considerations sur la force musculalire, suivies de la description et de l'exposition chalcographique d'un nouvel instrument pour mesurer cette force', Paris 1807.
2 Costaz 264-5.
3 This account is largely derived from the entry in N. B. G. and that given by Goimard.
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Bibliographie
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Gazette de France, 18 April 1783 (Announcement of a subscription for his aural meridian.
Description et usage d'un nouveau méridien à canon, Paris 1798. Reprinted in Bibliothèque physico-économique, 1809.
Mémoire explicatif du Dynamomètre et autres machines inventées par le Citoyen Regnier, Paris 1798; Reprinted in Journal de l'Ecole Polytechnique, ii 1798.
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Adresse ; enseigne ; période ; source
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30, r de Colombier Paris Costaz 264
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13, rue de l'Université Paris Almanach du Commerce
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Exposition année ; ville ; type ; récompense
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1802 Paris National
1819 Paris National
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Distinction
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Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, 1816.
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Identifiant
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1688
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ark:/18469/1q66b