Bourdon, Eugène
Contenu
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Nom
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Bourdon, Eugène
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Date de naissance
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8 April 1808
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Date de mort
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29 September 1884
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Lieu de mort
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Paris
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Couverture temporelle
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1832 - 1884
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Biographie
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The son of a business-man who wished his son also to follow a commercial career, Bourdon spent two years in Nuremberg learning German before starting in the silk trade (1). On the death of his father he turned to mechanical construction which had been his childhood delight, working first (1830-32) with Jecker (qv) and then a few months with Calla the elder (qv) before setting up his own business in 1832. The following year he was awarded a silver medal by the Société d’Encouragement for a model steam-engine with a glass cylinder, the first of a series of machine models for teaching that he developed. The success of these enabled him, in 1835, to buy an existing mechanics workshop in the Faubourg-du-Temple which he gradually expanded to 3000 sq metres of covered space. Here he diversified production into machine-tools, steam-engines and pumps as well as smaller devices such as float-indicators. He married in 1837.
On 17 June 1849 he patented a manometer and a metal tube barometer which were shown in the 1849 exhibition where he was awarded a gold medal. The steam-pressure gauge that he patented 19 June 1849, was very similar to one patented only a few months earlier in Germany by Schinz (2). Following further distinction in the 1851 Great Exhibition in London he was appointed a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. In the following years he made several further inventions, mainly related to steam engines, before passing direction of his business to his eldest son Edouard in 1872. He, like his brother Charles who was also an engineer, had been trained at the Ecole des Arts et Métiers. During the last ten years of his life, Bourdon devoted himself to research and to establishing a private collection of contemporary mechanics. Among devices invented or developed by him during this period were various forms of clocks, a series of self-registering meteorological instruments, a pneumatic clock (3), and a multiplying anemometer which was installed at the Observatoire de Paris (4). A founding member of the Société Française des Physiciens in 1884, Bourdon had a number of conflicts over priority with other inventors notably Vidié (qv ) about the metal barometer which dragged on from 1851, when Vidié had examples of it made by Bourdon seized, until 1861 when he was awarded a small sum in damages. Some of Bourdon's patents may have been shared with Richard (5).
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Notes biographiques
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1 This notice depends primarily on the obituary published by Gaston Tissandier in La Nature 12.2 1884, 289-91.
2 Middleton 403.
3 La Nature 479 1882, 147.
4 Idem 482 1882, 194.
5 Thus a metal barometer sold at Christie's SK 1. 7. 93 lot 12 is signed 'E. Bourdon et Richard Brevetés Paris. For technical details of the barometers and details of the dispute with Vidié see Middldeton 403-5.
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Bibliographie
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Horloge à tube flexible et son moteur hydro-pneumatique, Paris, 1876
Office des Brevets d'Invention…Mémoire descriptif deposé à l'appui de la demande d'un brevet …par Eugène Bourdon pour perfectionnnnements apportés aux pompes par l'appplication des tubes divergentes et convergentes-divergentes…, Paris, 1877
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Adresse ; enseigne ; période ; source
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12, rue Vendôme, Paris 1832.
74, faubourg du Temple Paris Almanach du Commerce 1835.
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Identifiant
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1188
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ark:/18469/1r7rf