1.
Paris
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Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. It has an area of 105 square kilometres and a population of 2,229,621 in 2013 within its administrative limits, the agglomeration has grown well beyond the citys administrative limits. By the 17th century, Paris was one of Europes major centres of finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts, and it retains that position still today. The aire urbaine de Paris, a measure of area, spans most of the Île-de-France region and has a population of 12,405,426. It is therefore the second largest metropolitan area in the European Union after London, the Metropole of Grand Paris was created in 2016, combining the commune and its nearest suburbs into a single area for economic and environmental co-operation. Grand Paris covers 814 square kilometres and has a population of 7 million persons, the Paris Region had a GDP of €624 billion in 2012, accounting for 30.0 percent of the GDP of France and ranking it as one of the wealthiest regions in Europe. The city is also a rail, highway, and air-transport hub served by two international airports, Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly. Opened in 1900, the subway system, the Paris Métro. It is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro, notably, Paris Gare du Nord is the busiest railway station in the world outside of Japan, with 262 millions passengers in 2015. In 2015, Paris received 22.2 million visitors, making it one of the top tourist destinations. The association football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris, the 80, 000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros, Paris hosted the 1900 and 1924 Summer Olympics and is bidding to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. The name Paris is derived from its inhabitants, the Celtic Parisii tribe. Thus, though written the same, the name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. In the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps, since the late 19th century, Paris has also been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in English as Parisians and in French as Parisiens and they are also pejoratively called Parigots. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the areas major north-south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité, this place of land and water trade routes gradually became a town
2.
Foucault pendulum
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The Foucault pendulum, or Foucaults pendulum, named after the French physicist Léon Foucault, is a simple device conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. While it had long known that the Earth rotates, the introduction of the Foucault pendulum in 1851 was the first simple proof of the rotation in an easy-to-see experiment. Today, Foucault pendulums are popular displays in museums and universities. The first public exhibition of a Foucault pendulum took place in February 1851 in the Meridian of the Paris Observatory. A few weeks later, Foucault made his most famous pendulum when he suspended a 28-kg brass-coated lead bob with a 67-m-long wire from the dome of the Panthéon, Paris. The plane of the pendulums swing rotated clockwise approximately 11. 3° per hour, the original bob used in 1851 at the Panthéon was moved in 1855 to the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris. A second temporary installation was made for the 50th anniversary in 1902, during museum reconstruction in the 1990s, the original pendulum was temporarily displayed at the Panthéon, but was later returned to the Musée des Arts et Métiers before it reopened in 2000. On April 6,2010, the cable suspending the bob in the Musée des Arts et Métiers snapped, causing damage to the pendulum. An exact copy of the pendulum had been swinging permanently since 1995 under the dome of the Panthéon. The pendulum has since been reinstalled, so, relative to Earth, the plane of oscillation of a pendulum at the North Pole undergoes a full clockwise rotation during one day, a pendulum at the South Pole rotates counterclockwise. When a Foucault pendulum is suspended at the equator, the plane of oscillation remains fixed relative to Earth, for example, a Foucault pendulum at 30° south latitude, viewed from above by an earthbound observer, rotates counterclockwise 360° in two days. To demonstrate rotation directly rather than indirectly via the swinging pendulum, the instrument could be observed either with a microscope viewing a tenth of a degree scale or by a long pointer. At least three copies of a Foucault gyro were made in convenient travelling and demonstration boxes and copies survive in the UK, France. A Foucault pendulum requires care to set up because imprecise construction can cause additional veering which masks the terrestrial effect, a pendulum day is the time needed for the plane of a freely suspended Foucault pendulum to complete an apparent rotation about the local vertical. This is one day divided by the sine of the latitude. From the perspective of a frame moving in tandem with Earth, but not sharing its rotation. If the plane of swing was north-south at the outset, it is east-west one sidereal day later and this implies that there has been exchange of momentum, the Earth and the pendulum bob have exchanged momentum. The Earth is so much more massive than the pendulum bob that the Earths change of momentum is unnoticeable, nonetheless, since the pendulum bobs plane of swing has shifted, the conservation laws imply that an exchange must have occurred
3.
Ader Avion III
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The Avion III was a primitive steam-powered aircraft built by Clément Ader between 1892 and 1897, financed by the French War Office. Retaining the same basic configuration of the Éole, the Avion III was equipped with two engines driving two propellers. While the earlier aircraft had no means of control at all. Trials of the aircraft began at the Satory army base near Versailles on 12 October 1897, the first flight was attempted on 14 October and most sources agree ended almost immediately in a crash without ever leaving the ground. Later in his life, Ader claimed that there had been a flight of 100 m on this day, whatever actually happened, the French military was unimpressed with the demonstration and cancelled any further funding. The machine is preserved at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris and it underwent extensive restoration in the 1980s.08 kW/kg
4.
Camera obscura
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The surroundings of the projected image have to be relatively dark for the image to be clear, so many historical camera obscura experiments were performed in dark rooms. The term camera obscura also refers to constructions or devices that use of the principle within a box. Camerae obscurae with a lens in the opening have been used since the second half of the 16th century, before the term camera obscura was first used in 1604, many other expressions were used including cubiculum obscurum, cubiculum tenebricosum, conclave obscurum and locus obscurus. Rays of light travel in straight lines and change when they are reflected and partly absorbed by an object, retaining information about the color, lit objects reflect rays of light in all directions. The human eye itself works much like a camera obscura with an opening, a biconvex lens, a camera obscura device consists of a box, tent or room with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside, where the scene is reproduced, inverted and reversed. The image can be projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce an accurate representation. In order to produce a reasonably clear projected image, the aperture has to be about 1/100th the distance to the screen, many camerae obscurae use a lens rather than a pinhole because it allows a larger aperture, giving a usable brightness while maintaining focus. As the pinhole is made smaller, the image gets sharper, with too small a pinhole, however, the sharpness worsens, due to diffraction. Using mirrors, as in an 18th-century overhead version, it is possible to project a right-side-up image, another more portable type is a box with an angled mirror projecting onto tracing paper placed on the glass top, the image being upright as viewed from the back. There are theories that occurrences of camera obscura effects inspired paleolithic cave paintings and it is also suggested that camera obscura projections could have played a role in Neolithic structures. Perforated gnomons projecting an image of the sun were described in the Chinese Zhoubi Suanjing writings. The location of the circle can be measured to tell the time of day. In Arab and European cultures its invention was later attributed to Egyptian astronomer. Some ancient sightings of gods and spirits, especially in worship, are thought to possibly have been conjured up by means of camera obscura projections. In these writings it is explained how the image in a collecting-point or treasure house is inverted by an intersecting point that collected the light. Light coming from the foot of a person would partly be hidden below. Rays from the head would partly be hidden above and partly form the part of the image
5.
Daguerreotype
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Daguerreotype process, or daguerreotypy, was the first publicly available photographic process, and for nearly twenty years it was the one most commonly used. During the past few decades, there has been a revival of daguerreotypy among photographers interested in making artistic use of early photographic processes. The darkest areas of the image are simply bare silver, lighter areas have a microscopically fine light-scattering texture, the surface is very delicate, and even the lightest wiping can permanently scuff it. Some tarnish around the edges is normal, the name daguerreotype correctly refers only to one very specific image type and medium, the product of a process that was in wide use only from the early 1840s to the late 1850s. Since the Renaissance era, artists and inventors had searched for a method of capturing visual scenes. Later, with the advent of Modernism, the absence of perspective in art from China, Japan. To copy these images was the first object of Mr. Daguerre met with Niépce, Niépce had invented an early internal combustion engine together with his brother Claude and made improvements to the velocipede, as well as experimenting with lithography and related processes. Their correspondence reveals that Niépce was at first reluctant to any details of his work with photographic images. To guard against letting any secrets out before the invention had been improved,15, for example, signified the tanning action of the sun on human skin,34 - a camera obscura,74 - sulphuric acid. Niépce undertook to release details of the process he had invented - the asphalt process or heliography, Daguerre was sworn to secrecy under penalty of damages, and undertook to design a camera and improve the process. The improved process was named the physautotype. Niépces early experiments had derived from his interest in lithography, the asphalt process, or heliography required exposures that were so long that Arago said it was not fit for use. Nevertheless, without Niépces experiments, it is unlikely that Daguerre would have been able to build on them to adapt, after Niépces death in 1833, his son, Isidore, inherited rights in the contract and a new version was drawn up between Daguerre and Isidore. It would bear Daguerres name alone and this was the daguerreotype process that used iodized silvered plates and was developed with mercury fumes. To exploit the invention four hundred shares would be on offer for a thousand francs each, or, the rights of the process could be bought for twenty thousand francs. Everyone says it is superb, but it will cost us the thousand francs before we learn it and be able to judge if it could remain secret. M. de Mandelot himself knows several persons who could subscribe but will not do so because they think it would be revealed by itself, and now I have proof that many think in this way. I entirely agree with the idea of M. Arago, that is get the government to purchase this discovery, nevertheless, he benefited from the state pension awarded to him together with Daguerre
6.
Binoculars
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Binoculars or field glasses are two telescopes mounted side-by-side and aligned to point in the same direction, allowing the viewer to use both eyes when viewing distant objects. Most are sized to be held using both hands, although sizes vary widely from opera glasses to large pedestal mounted military models. Almost from the invention of the telescope in the 17th century the advantages of mounting two of them side by side for binocular vision seems to have been explored, most early binoculars used Galilean optics, that is, they used a convex objective and a concave eyepiece lens. The Galilean design has the advantage of presenting an image but has a narrow field of view and is not capable of very high magnification. This type of construction is used in very cheap models. They also have large exit pupils making centering less critical and the field of view works well in those applications. These are typically mounted on a frame or custom-fit onto eyeglasses. An improved image and higher magnification is achieved in binoculars employing Keplerian optics, since the Keplerian configuration produces an inverted image, different methods were used to turn the image right way up. In aprismatic binoculars with Keplerian optics each tube has one or two additional lenses between the objective and the ocular and these lenses are used to erect the image. The binoculars with erecting lenses have a disadvantage, their length is too long. Such binoculars were popular in the 1800s, but became obsolete shortly after the Karl Zeiss company introduced improved prism binoculars in the 1890s, Optical prisms added to the design are another way to turn the image right way up, usually in a Porro prism or roof-prisms design. Porro prism binoculars are named after Italian optician Ignazio Porro who patented this image erecting system in 1854, Binoculars of this type use a Porro prism in a double prism Z-shaped configuration to erect the image. This feature results in binoculars that are wide, with lenses that are well separated. Thus, the size of binoculars is reduced, Binoculars using roof prisms may have appeared as early as the 1870s in a design by Achille Victor Emile Daubresse. Most roof prism binoculars use either the Abbe-Koenig prism or the Schmidt-Pechan prism designs to erect the image and they have objective lenses that are approximately in line with the eyepieces. Roof-prisms designs create an instrument that is narrower and more compact than Porro prisms, there is also a difference in image brightness. Roof-prisms designs also require tighter tolerances for alignment of their optical elements and this adds to their expense since the design requires them to use fixed elements that need to be set at a high degree of collimation at the factory. Porro prisms binoculars occasionally need their prism sets to be re-aligned to bring them into collimation, the fixed alignment in roof-prism designs means the binoculars normally will not need re-collimation
7.
Antoine Lavoisier
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Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier was a French nobleman and chemist central to the 18th-century chemical revolution and had a large influence on both the history of chemistry and the history of biology. He is widely considered in popular literature as the father of modern chemistry and it is generally accepted that Lavoisiers great accomplishments in chemistry largely stem from his changing the science from a qualitative to a quantitative one. Lavoisier is most noted for his discovery of the role oxygen plays in combustion and he recognized and named oxygen and hydrogen and opposed the phlogiston theory. Lavoisier helped construct the system, wrote the first extensive list of elements. He predicted the existence of silicon and was also the first to establish that sulfur was an element rather than a compound and he discovered that, although matter may change its form or shape, its mass always remains the same. Lavoisier was a member of a number of aristocratic councils. All of these political and economic activities enabled him to fund his scientific research, at the height of the French Revolution, he was accused by Jean-Paul Marat of selling adulterated tobaccoand of other crimes, and was eventually guillotined a year after Marats death. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was born to a family of the nobility in Paris on 26 August 1743. The son of an attorney at the Parliament of Paris, he inherited a fortune at the age of five with the passing of his mother. Lavoisier began his schooling at the Collège des Quatre-Nations, University of Paris in Paris in 1754 at the age of 11, in his last two years at the school, his scientific interests were aroused, and he studied chemistry, botany, astronomy, and mathematics. Lavoisier entered the school of law, where he received a degree in 1763. Lavoisier received a law degree and was admitted to the bar, however, he continued his scientific education in his spare time. Lavoisiers education was filled with the ideals of the French Enlightenment of the time and he attended lectures in the natural sciences. Lavoisiers devotion and passion for chemistry were largely influenced by Étienne Condillac and his first chemical publication appeared in 1764. From 1763 to 1767, he studied geology under Jean-Étienne Guettard, in collaboration with Guettard, Lavoisier worked on a geological survey of Alsace-Lorraine in June 1767. In 1768 Lavoisier received an appointment to the Academy of Sciences. In 1769, he worked on the first geological map of France, on behalf of the Ferme générale Lavoisier commissioned the building of a wall around Paris so that customs duties could be collected from those transporting goods into and out of the city. Lavoisier attempted to introduce reforms in the French monetary and taxation system to help the peasants, Lavoisier consolidated his social and economic position when, in 1771 at age 28, he married Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, the 13-year-old daughter of a senior member of the Ferme générale
8.
Laboratory
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A laboratory is a facility that provides controlled conditions in which scientific or technological research, experiments, and measurement may be performed. Laboratories used for scientific research take many forms because of the requirements of specialists in the various fields of science. A physics laboratory might contain a particle accelerator or vacuum chamber, a chemist or biologist might use a wet laboratory, while a psychologists laboratory might be a room with one-way mirrors and hidden cameras in which to observe behavior. In some laboratories, such as commonly used by computer scientists. Scientists in other fields will use other types of laboratories. Engineers use laboratories as well to design, build, and test technological devices, scientific laboratories can be found as research and learning spaces in schools and universities, industry, government, or military facilities, and even aboard ships and spacecraft. Early instances of laboratories recorded in English involved alchemy and the preparation of medicines, larger or more sophisticated equipment is generally called a scientific instrument. Both laboratory equipment and scientific instruments are increasingly being designed and shared using open hardware principles, open source labs use open source scientific hardware. The title of laboratory is used for certain other facilities where the processes or equipment used are similar to those in scientific laboratories. In many labs, though, hazards are present, in laboratories where dangerous conditions might exist, safety precautions are important. Rules exist to minimize the risk, and safety equipment is used to protect the lab user from injury or to assist in responding to an emergency. This standard is referred to as the Laboratory Standard. Under this standard, a laboratory is required to produce a Chemical Hygiene Plan which addresses the specific hazards found in its location, the CHP must be reviewed annually. Many schools and businesses employ safety, health, and environmental specialists, such as a Chemical Hygiene Officer to develop, manage, and evaluate their CHP. Additionally, third party review is used to provide an objective outside view which provides a fresh look at areas. An important element of such audits is the review of regulatory compliance, training is critical to the ongoing safe operation of the laboratory facility. Educators, staff and management must be engaged in working to reduce the likelihood of accidents, injuries, efforts are made to ensure laboratory safety videos are both relevant and engaging. The dictionary definition of laboratory at Wiktionary Media related to Laboratory at Wikimedia Commons Nobel Laureates Interactive 360° Laboratories
9.
Blaise Pascal
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Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. He was a prodigy who was educated by his father. Pascal also wrote in defence of the scientific method, in 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines. After three years of effort and 50 prototypes, he built 20 finished machines over the following 10 years, following Galileo Galilei and Torricelli, in 1647, he rebutted Aristotles followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascals results caused many disputes before being accepted, in 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within Catholicism known by its detractors as Jansenism. Following a religious experience in late 1654, he began writing works on philosophy. His two most famous works date from this period, the Lettres provinciales and the Pensées, the set in the conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits. In that year, he wrote an important treatise on the arithmetical triangle. Between 1658 and 1659 he wrote on the cycloid and its use in calculating the volume of solids, Pascal had poor health, especially after the age of 18, and he died just two months after his 39th birthday. Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand, which is in Frances Auvergne region and he lost his mother, Antoinette Begon, at the age of three. His father, Étienne Pascal, who also had an interest in science and mathematics, was a local judge, Pascal had two sisters, the younger Jacqueline and the elder Gilberte. In 1631, five years after the death of his wife, the newly arrived family soon hired Louise Delfault, a maid who eventually became an instrumental member of the family. Étienne, who never remarried, decided that he alone would educate his children, for they all showed extraordinary intellectual ability, the young Pascal showed an amazing aptitude for mathematics and science. Particularly of interest to Pascal was a work of Desargues on conic sections and it states that if a hexagon is inscribed in a circle then the three intersection points of opposite sides lie on a line. Pascals work was so precocious that Descartes was convinced that Pascals father had written it, in France at that time offices and positions could be—and were—bought and sold. In 1631 Étienne sold his position as president of the Cour des Aides for 65,665 livres. The money was invested in a government bond which provided, if not a lavish, then certainly a comfortable income which allowed the Pascal family to move to, but in 1638 Richelieu, desperate for money to carry on the Thirty Years War, defaulted on the governments bonds. Suddenly Étienne Pascals worth had dropped from nearly 66,000 livres to less than 7,300 and it was only when Jacqueline performed well in a childrens play with Richelieu in attendance that Étienne was pardoned
10.
Calculator
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An electronic calculator is a small, portable electronic device used to perform operations ranging from basic arithmetic to complex mathematics. The first solid state electronic calculator was created in the 1960s, building on the history of tools such as the abacus. It was developed in parallel with the computers of the day. The pocket sized devices became available in the 1970s, especially after the first microprocessor and they later became used commonly within the petroleum industry. Modern electronic calculators vary, from cheap, give-away, credit-card-sized models to sturdy desktop models with built-in printers and they became popular in the mid-1970s. By the end of decade, calculator prices had reduced to a point where a basic calculator was affordable to most. In addition to general purpose calculators, there are designed for specific markets. For example, there are scientific calculators which include trigonometric and statistical calculations, some calculators even have the ability to do computer algebra. Graphing calculators can be used to graph functions defined on the real line, as of 2016, basic calculators cost little, but the scientific and graphing models tend to cost more. In 1986, calculators still represented an estimated 41% of the worlds general-purpose hardware capacity to compute information, by 2007, this diminished to less than 0. 05%. Modern 2016 electronic calculators contain a keyboard with buttons for digits and arithmetical operations, most basic calculators assign only one digit or operation on each button, however, in more specific calculators, a button can perform multi-function working with key combinations. Large-sized figures and comma separators are used to improve readability. Various symbols for function commands may also be shown on the display, fractions such as 1⁄3 are displayed as decimal approximations, for example rounded to 0.33333333. Also, some fractions can be difficult to recognize in decimal form, as a result, Calculators also have the ability to store numbers into computer memory. Basic types of these only one number at a time. The variables can also be used for constructing formulas, some models have the ability to extend memory capacity to store more numbers, the extended memory address is termed an array index. Power sources of calculators are, batteries, solar cells or mains electricity, some models even have no turn-off button but they provide some way to put off. Crank-powered calculators were also common in the computer era
11.
Industrial design
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Industrial design is a process of design applied to products that are to be manufactured through techniques of mass production. This distinguishes industrial design from craft-based design, where the form of the product is determined by the creator at the time of its creation. The role of a designer is to create and execute design solutions for problems of form, function, usability, physical ergonomics, marketing, brand development, sustainability. The division of labour that underlies the practice of design did have precedents in the pre-industrial era. The use of drawing to specify how something was to be constructed later was first developed by architects and shipwrights during the Italian Renaissance. The emergence of industrial design is linked to the growth of industrialisation and mechanisation that began with the industrial revolution in Great Britain in the mid 18th century. The first use of the industrial design is often attributed to the industrial designer Joseph Claude Sinel in 1919. Christopher Dresser is considered among the first independent industrial designers, Industrial designs origins lie in the industrialization of consumer products. The earliest use of the term may have been in The Art Union, the Practical Draughtsmans Book of Industrial Design by Jacques-Eugène Armengaud was printed in 1853. The subtitle of the work explains, that it wants to offer a course of mechanical, engineering. The study of those types of drawing, according to Armengaud. This work paved the way for a big expansion in the drawing education in France, the United Kingdom. Robert Lepper helped to establish one of the countrys first industrial design programs at Carnegie Institute of Technology. Product design and industrial design overlap in the fields of user interface design, information design, except for certain functional areas of overlap between industrial design and engineering design, educational programs in the U. S. Most industrial designers complete a design or related program at a school or university. Diplomas and degrees take two to four years of study, the study results in a Bachelor of Industrial Design, Bachelor of Science or Bachelor of Fine Arts. Afterwards, the programme can be extended to postgraduate degrees such as Master of Design, Master of Fine Arts. Industrial design studies function and form—and the connection between product, user, and environment, generally, industrial design professionals work in small scale design, rather than overall design of complex systems such as buildings or ships
12.
Supercomputer
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A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of computing performance compared to a general-purpose computer. Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second instead of instructions per second. As of 2015, there are supercomputers which can perform up to quadrillions of FLOPS and it tops the rankings in the TOP500 supercomputer list. Sunway TaihuLights emergence is also notable for its use of indigenous chips, as of June 2016, China, for the first time, had more computers on the TOP500 list than the United States. However, U. S. built computers held ten of the top 20 positions, in November 2016 the U. S. has five of the top 10, throughout their history, they have been essential in the field of cryptanalysis. The use of multi-core processors combined with centralization is an emerging trend, the history of supercomputing goes back to the 1960s, with the Atlas at the University of Manchester and a series of computers at Control Data Corporation, designed by Seymour Cray. These used innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance, Cray left CDC in 1972 to form his own company, Cray Research. Four years after leaving CDC, Cray delivered the 80 MHz Cray 1 in 1976, the Cray-2 released in 1985 was an 8 processor liquid cooled computer and Fluorinert was pumped through it as it operated. It performed at 1.9 gigaflops and was the second fastest after M-13 supercomputer in Moscow. Fujitsus Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer used 166 vector processors to gain the top spot in 1994 with a speed of 1.7 gigaFLOPS per processor. The Hitachi SR2201 obtained a performance of 600 GFLOPS in 1996 by using 2048 processors connected via a fast three-dimensional crossbar network. The Intel Paragon could have 1000 to 4000 Intel i860 processors in various configurations, the Paragon was a MIMD machine which connected processors via a high speed two dimensional mesh, allowing processes to execute on separate nodes, communicating via the Message Passing Interface. Approaches to supercomputer architecture have taken dramatic turns since the earliest systems were introduced in the 1960s, early supercomputer architectures pioneered by Seymour Cray relied on compact innovative designs and local parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. However, in time the demand for increased computational power ushered in the age of massively parallel systems, supercomputers of the 21st century can use over 100,000 processors connected by fast connections. The Connection Machine CM-5 supercomputer is a parallel processing computer capable of many billions of arithmetic operations per second. Throughout the decades, the management of heat density has remained a key issue for most centralized supercomputers, the large amount of heat generated by a system may also have other effects, e. g. reducing the lifetime of other system components. There have been diverse approaches to management, from pumping Fluorinert through the system. Systems with a number of processors generally take one of two paths
13.
Cray-2
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The Cray-2 is a supercomputer with four vector processors built with emitter-coupled logic and made by Cray Research starting in 1985. At 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, it was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, the Cray-2 was replaced as the worlds fastest computer by the ETA-10G in 1990. With the successful launch of his famed Cray-1, Seymour Cray turned to the design of its successor. By 1979 he had become fed up with management interruptions in what was now a large company, and as he had done in the past, decided to resign his management post and move to form a new lab. As with his move to Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin from Control Data HQ in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Cray management understood his needs and supported his move to a new lab in Boulder. Working as an independent consultant at these new Cray Labs, he put together a team and this Lab would later close, and a decade later a new facility in Colorado Springs would open. The classic example of design is the CDC8600, which packed four CDC 7600-like machines based on ECL logic into a 1 x 1 meter cylinder. Unfortunately the density needed to achieve this cycle time led to the machines downfall, one solution to this problem, one that most computer vendors had already moved to, was to use integrated circuits instead of individual components. Each IC included a selection of components from a module pre-wired into a circuit by the construction process. If an IC did not work, another one would be tried, at the time the 8600 was being designed the simple MOSFET-based technology did not offer the speed Cray needed. Relentless improvements changed things by the mid-1970s, however, and the Cray-1 had been able to use newer ICs, in fact, the Cray-1 was actually somewhat faster than the 8600 because it packed considerably more logic into the system due to the ICs small size. Although IC design continued to improve, the size of the ICs was constrained largely by mechanical limits. In order to gain another 10-fold increase in performance over the Cray-1, the goal Cray aimed for, another design problem was the increasing performance gap between the processor and main memory. In the era of the CDC6600 memory ran at the speed as the processor. Cray solved this by adding ten smaller computers to the system, allowing them to deal with the external storage. Adding four processors simply made this problem worse and it was the foreground processors task to run the computer, handling storage and making efficient use of the multiple channels into main memory. It drove the background processors by passing in the instructions they should run via eight 16 word buffers, modern CPUs use a variation of this design as well, although the foreground processor is now referred to as the load/store unit and is not a complete machine unto its own. Main memory banks were arranged in quadrants to be accessed at the same time, the downside to this approach is that the cost of setting up the scatter/gather unit in the foreground processor was fairly high
14.
Saint-Martin-des-Champs Priory
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The Priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs was an influential monastery established in what is now the city of Paris, France. Its surviving buildings are considered treasures of Medieval architecture in the city, the oldest known structure on the site was a chapel dedicated to St. Martin of Tours, founded during the Merovingian dynasty, which appears in a text of 710. At a date which remains unknown, a community of monks became established there around the chapel, the abbey they founded was pillaged and destroyed by Norman invaders during the late 10th century. In 1060, King Henry I of France chose to rebuild the complex of the former abbey, at that era, it still remained outside the walls of the city, thus its designation as des champs. In 1079 the priory was given to St, the priory church was completed in 1135, having a choir section with a double ambulatory, topped by a simple ribbed arch. The nave was completed during the 13th century, as was the refectory of the priory, the later two are attributed to Pierre de Montreuil. These are the surviving portions of the monastic complex today. The priory maintained a presence in the religious and social life of Paris. Over time, the priory fell subject to the system of commendatory abbots, the famous Cardinal Richelieu can be counted among their number. The priory was suppressed in 1790 under the new laws of the French Revolution, the monastic walls and dormitories was soon torn down. The surviving structures of the priory became the home of the Museum of Arts and Crafts, the original Foucault Pendulum was housed there from 1855 until it was irreparably damaged in 2010
15.
3rd arrondissement of Paris
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The 3rd arrondissement of Paris, situated on the right bank of the River Seine, is the smallest in area after the 2nd arrondissement. The arrondissement contains the northern, quieter part of the district of Le Marais. The oldest surviving house of Paris, built in 1407, is to be found in the 3rd arrondissement. The ancient Jewish quarter, the Pletzel which dates from the 13th century begins in the part of the 3rd arrondissement. It is home to the Musée dart et dhistoire du judaïsme, although trendy boutiques are now taking up many of the storefronts, there are still landmark stores selling traditional Jewish foods. With a land area of 1.171 km2, the 3rd arrondissement is the second smallest arrondissement in the city, the area now occupied by the third arrondissement attained its peak population in the period preceding the re-organization of Paris in 1860. In 1999, the population was 34,248, while the arrondissement hosted a total of 29,723 jobs, ¹The peak of population actually occurred before 1861, but the arrondissement was created in 1860, so we do not have figures before 1861
16.
Saint-Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis
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Saint-Denis is a commune in the northern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located 9.4 km from the centre of Paris, Saint-Denis is a subprefecture of the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, being the seat of the arrondissement of Saint-Denis. Saint-Denis is home to the necropolis of the Basilica of Saint Denis and was also the location of the associated abbey. It is also home to Frances national football and rugby stadium, Saint-Denis is a formerly industrial suburb currently changing its economic base. Inhabitants of Saint-Denis are called Dionysiens, until the 3rd century, Saint-Denis was a small settlement called Catolacus or Catulliacum, probably meaning estate of Catullius, a Gallo-Roman landowner. About 250 AD, the first bishop of Paris, Saint Denis, was martyred on Montmartre hill, shortly after 250 his grave became a shrine and a pilgrimage centre, with the building of the Abbey of Saint Denis, and the settlement was renamed Saint-Denis. In 1793, during the French Revolution, Saint-Denis was renamed Franciade in a gesture of rejection of religion, in 1803, however, under the Consulate of Napoléon Bonaparte, the city reverted to its former name of Saint-Denis. During its history, Saint-Denis has been associated with the French royal house. Starting from Dagobert I, almost every French king was buried in the Basilica, however, Saint-Denis is older than that. In the 2nd century, there was a Gallo-Roman village named Catolacus on the location that Saint-Denis occupies today, Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris and patron saint of France, was martyred in about 250 and buried in the cemetery of Catolacus. Denis tomb quickly became a place of worship, around 475, Sainte Geneviève had a small chapel erected on Denis tomb, which by then had become a popular destination for pilgrims. It was this chapel that Dagobert I had rebuilt and turned into a royal monastery, during the Middle Ages, because of the privileges granted by Dagobert, Saint-Denis grew to become very important. Merchants from all over Europe came to visit its market, in 1140, Abbot Suger, counselor to the King, granted further privileges to the citizens of Saint-Denis. He also started the work of enlarging the Basilica of Saint Denis that still exists today, the new church was consecrated in 1144. Saint-Denis suffered heavily in the Hundred Years War, of its 10,000 citizens, during the French Wars of Religion, the Battle of Saint-Denis was fought between Catholics and Protestants on 10 November 1567. The Protestants were defeated, but the Catholic commander Anne de Montmorency was killed, in 1590, the city surrendered to Henry IV, who converted to Catholicism in 1593 in the abbey of Saint-Denis. King Louis XIV started several industries in Saint-Denis, weaving and spinning mills and dyehouses. His successor, Louis XV, whose daughter was a nun in the Carmelite convent, took a lively interest in the city, he added a chapel to the convent and also renovated the buildings of the royal abbey
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Statue of Liberty
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The Statue of Liberty is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor in New York City, in the United States. The copper statue, a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States, was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the statue was dedicated on October 28,1886. The Statue of Liberty is a female figure representing Libertas. She holds a torch above her head, and in her left arm carries a tabula ansata inscribed July 4,1776, a broken chain lies at her feet. The statue became an icon of freedom and of the United States, due to the post-war instability in France, work on the statue did not commence until the early 1870s. In 1875, Laboulaye proposed that the French finance the statue, Bartholdi completed the head and the torch-bearing arm before the statue was fully designed, and these pieces were exhibited for publicity at international expositions. The torch-bearing arm was displayed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, fundraising proved difficult, especially for the Americans, and by 1885 work on the pedestal was threatened due to lack of funds. Publisher Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World started a drive for donations to complete the project attracted more than 120,000 contributors. The statue was constructed in France, shipped overseas in crates, the statues completion was marked by New Yorks first ticker-tape parade and a dedication ceremony presided over by President Grover Cleveland. The statue was administered by the United States Lighthouse Board until 1901 and then by the Department of War, public access to the balcony surrounding the torch has been barred for safety reasons since 1916. The project is traced to a conversation between Édouard René de Laboulaye, a staunch abolitionist and Frédéric Bartholdi, a sculptor. The National Park Service, in a 2000 report, however, deemed this a legend traced to an 1885 fundraising pamphlet, in order to honor these achievements, Laboulaye proposed that a gift be built for the United States on behalf of France. Laboulaye hoped that by calling attention to the recent achievements of the United States, according to sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who later recounted the story, Laboulayes comment was not intended as a proposal, but it inspired Bartholdi. Given the repressive nature of the regime of Napoleon III, Bartholdi took no action on the idea except to discuss it with Laboulaye. Sketches and models were made of the work, though it was never erected. There was a precedent for the Suez proposal, the Colossus of Rhodes. This statue is believed to have been over 100 feet high, any large project was further delayed by the Franco-Prussian War, in which Bartholdi served as a major of militia. In the war, Napoleon III was captured and deposed, Bartholdis home province of Alsace was lost to the Prussians, and a more liberal republic was installed in France
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Aviation in the pioneer era
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Once the principles of powered controlled flight had been established there was a period in which many different aircraft configurations were experimented with. By 1914 the tractor configuration biplane had become the most popular form of aircraft design, consequently, attempts to achieve powered flight continued, principally in France. To publicize the aeronautical concourse at the upcoming Worlds Fair in St. Louis, Octave Chanute gave a number of lectures at aero-clubs in Europe and he showed slides of his own glider flying experiments as well as some of the Wrights glider flying in 1901 and 1902. All these talks were reproduced in club journals and you, the Maecenases, and you too, the Government, put your hands in your pockets—or else we are beaten. P. W. Boulton of the United Kingdom in 1868 and this was not successful and Esnault-Pelterie was later to use its failure to support the position that the Wright Brothers claims were unfounded. However his design was not a copy of the Wrights glider. Voisin and Blériot then constructed a tandem wing biplane, which was subjected to a number of modifications without any success. Full details of the Wright Brothers flight control system was published in lAérophile in the January 1906 issue, nevertheless, the crucial importance of lateral control in making controlled turns was not appreciated, and the French experimenters instead aimed to construct inherently stable aircraft. On 16 November 1907 he successfully flew his Blériot VII, a monoplane with tail surfaces moved differentially for roll control, the AEA produced a number of fundamentally similar biplane designs, greatly influenced by the Wrights work, and these were flown with increasing success during 1908. On 4 July 1908 their next aircraft, the June Bug piloted by Glenn Curtiss, after the AEAs disbandment at the end of March 1909, one of its American members went on to start a growing US-based aviation firm. I am not sufficiently calm after the event to express my opinion. My view can be best conveyed in the words, It is marvellous, leon Delagrange simply said We are beaten. His first design, the Farman III was one of the most successful designs of the pioneer era. 1909 can be regarded as the year in which aviation came of age, at the end of 1908 the first exhibition devoted to aircraft was held in the Grand Palais in Paris, and this was followed by the first London Aero Exhibition at Olympia in May 1909. The Aéro-Club de France issued its first pilots licences in January, the first British magazine to be devoted to the subject, Flight published its first issue in January. This was met by widespread derision, the satirical magazine Punch responded by offering a prize for a flight to Mars. In June 1909 Louis Blériot won their £1000 prize for the first flight across the English channel. One contemporary newspaper led its account of the event with the headline Britain is no longer an island, Blériot became world-famous, and the publicity resulted in over a hundred orders for copies of his design within a few weeks
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Pascal's calculator
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Pascals calculator is a mechanical calculator invented by Blaise Pascal in the early 17th century. Pascal was led to develop a calculator by the laborious arithmetical calculations required by his fathers work as supervisor of taxes in Rouen and he designed the machine to add and subtract two numbers directly and to perform multiplication and division through repeated addition or subtraction. Pascals calculator was successful in the design of its carry mechanism, which adds 1 to 9 on one dial. His innovation made each digit independent of the state of the others, Pascal designed the machine in 1642, and after 50 prototypes, he presented it to the public in 1645, dedicating it to Pierre Séguier, then chancellor of France. Pascal built around twenty more machines during the decade, many of which improved on his original design. In 1649, King Louis XIV of France gave Pascal a royal privilege, gottfried Leibniz invented his Leibniz wheels after 1671 after trying to add an automatic multiplication feature to the Pascaline. In 1820, Thomas de Colmar designed his arithmometer and it is not at all clear whether he ever saw Leibnizs device, but he either re-invented it or utilised Leibnizs invention of the step drum. The arithmometer was the first mechanical calculator strong enough and reliable enough to be used daily in an office environment, Pascal was also influential in seeking to commercialise his machine. Nine Pascal calculators have been made, including the first surviving mechanical calculator from the 17th century, most of them are on display in European museums. Pascal has been called and celebrated as the inventor of the mechanical calculator, Pascal began to work on his calculator in 1642, when he was 19 years old. He had been assisting his father, who worked as a tax commissioner, Pascal received a Royal Privilege in 1649 that granted him exclusive rights to make and sell calculating machines in France. By 1654 he had sold about twenty machines, but the cost and complexity of the Pascaline was a barrier to further sales, by that time Pascal had moved on to the study of religion and philosophy, which gave us both the Lettres provinciales and the Pensées. The tercentenary celebration of Pascals invention of the mechanical calculator occurred during WWII when France was occupied by Germany and therefore the main celebration was held in London, the calculator had spoked metal wheel dials, with the digit 0 through 9 displayed around the circumference of each wheel. This displayed the number in the windows at the top of the calculator, then, one simply redialed the second number to be added, causing the sum of both numbers to appear in the accumulator. Each dial is associated with a display window located directly above it. The complement of this digit, in the base of the wheel, is displayed just above this digit. A horizontal bar hides either all the complement numbers when it is slid to the top and it thereby displays either the content of the accumulator or the complement of its value. Since the gears of the calculator rotated in one direction
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Foucault's Pendulum
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Foucaults Pendulum is a novel by Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco. It was first published in 1988, and an English translation by William Weaver appeared a year later, Foucaults Pendulum is divided into ten segments represented by the ten Sefiroth. The satirical novel is full of references to Kabbalah, alchemy and conspiracy theory—so many. The pendulum of the title refers to a pendulum designed by the French physicist Léon Foucault to demonstrate Earths rotation. After reading too many manuscripts about occult conspiracy theories, three vanity publisher employees invent their own conspiracy for fun and they call this satirical intellectual game The Plan. The three become increasingly obsessed with The Plan, and sometimes forget that it is just a game, worse still, other conspiracy theorists learn about The Plan, and take it seriously. Belbo finds himself the target of a secret society that believes he possesses the key to the lost treasure of the Knights Templar. The book opens with the narrator, Casaubon hiding in fear after closing time in the Parisian technical museum Musée des Arts et Métiers and he believes that members of a secret society have kidnapped Belbo and are now after him. Most of the novel is told in flashback as Casaubon waits in the museum. During this period he meets Belbo, who works as an editor in a publishing house, Belbo invites Casaubon to review the manuscript of a supposedly non-fiction book about the Templars. Casaubon also meets Belbos colleague Diotallevi, a cabalist, the book, by a Colonel Ardenti, claims a hidden coded manuscript has revealed a secret plan of the medieval Templars to take over the world. This supposed conspiracy is meant as revenge for the deaths of the Templar leaders when their order was disbanded by the King of France. Ardenti postulates that the Templars were the guardians of a treasure, perhaps the Holy Grail of legend. According to Ardentis theory, after the French monarchy and the Catholic Church disbanded the Templars on the grounds of heresy and these cells have been meeting at regular intervals in distinct places to pass on information about the Grail. Ultimately, these cells will reunite to rediscover the Grails location, according to Ardentis calculations, the Templars should have taken over the world in 1944, evidently the plan has been interrupted. Ardenti mysteriously vanishes after meeting with Belbo and Casaubon to discuss his book, a police inspector, De Angelis, interviews both men. He hints that his job as a political department investigator leads him to not only revolutionaries. Casaubon has a romance with a Brazilian woman named Amparo and he leaves Italy to follow her and spends a few years in Brazil
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Umberto Eco
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Umberto Eco OMRI was an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician, and university professor. He is best known internationally for his 1980 novel Il nome della rosa, a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies and he later wrote other novels, including Il pendolo di Foucault and Lisola del giorno prima. His novel Il cimitero di Praga, released in 2010, topped the charts in Italy. Eco also wrote texts, childrens books, and essays. Eco was born in the city of Alessandria, in Piedmont in northern Italy and his father, Giulio, one of thirteen children, was an accountant before the government called him to serve in three wars. During World War II, Umberto and his mother, Giovanna, Eco received a Salesian education and made references to the order and its founder in his works and interviews. His family name is supposedly an acronym of ex caelis oblatus, during his university studies, Eco stopped believing in God and left the Catholic Church. After that, Eco worked as an editor for the state broadcasting station Radiotelevisione Italiana. A group of artists, painters, musicians and writers. This was especially true after the publication of his first book in 1956, Il problema estetico in San Tommaso and this also marked the beginning of his lecturing career at his alma mater. In September 1962 he married Renate Ramge, a German art teacher with whom he had a son and he divided his time between an apartment in Milan and a vacation house near Urbino. He had a 30,000 volume library in the former and he was a visiting professor at Columbia University several times in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1992–1993 Eco was the Norton professor at Harvard University, six books that were authored, co-authored, or co-edited by Eco were published by the Indiana University Press. He frequently collaborated with his friend Thomas Sebeok, semiotician and Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Indiana University and he became Satrap of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique in 2001. On 23 May 2002, Eco received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, in 2009, the University of Belgrade in Serbia awarded him an honorary doctorate. Eco was a member of the Italian skeptic organization Comitato Italiano per il Controllo delle Affermazioni sulle Pseudoscienze CICAP, Eco died at his Milanese home of pancreatic cancer, from which he had been suffering for two years, on the night of 19 February 2016. At the time of his death at the age of 84, he was a professor emeritus at the University of Bologna, in 1959 Eco published his second book, Sviluppo dellestetica medievale, on medieval philosophy. After 18 months military service in the Italian Army, he left RAI in 1959 to become the senior editor of the Bompiani publishing house in Milan
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Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot
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Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot was a French inventor who built the first working self-propelled land-based mechanical vehicle, the worlds first automobile. Cugnot was born in Void-Vacon, Lorraine, France and he trained as a military engineer. In 1765 he began experimenting with working models of steam-engine-powered vehicles for the French Army, French Army Captain Cugnot was one of the first to successfully employ a device for converting the reciprocating motion of a steam piston into a rotary motion by means of a ratchet arrangement. A small version of his three-wheeled fardier à vapeur was made, in 1770, a full-size version of the fardier à vapeur was built, specified to be able to carry four tons and cover two lieues in one hour, a performance it never achieved in practice. The vehicle weighed about 2.5 tonnes tare, and had two wheels at the rear and one in the front where the horses would normally have been, the front wheel supported a steam boiler and driving mechanism. The power unit was articulated to the trailer, and was steered from there by means of a double handle arrangement, one source states that it seated four passengers and moved at a speed of 2.25 miles per hour. The vehicle was reported to have very unstable due to poor weight distribution. This would have been a disadvantage since the fardier was intended to be able to traverse rough terrain. In 1771 the second vehicle is said to have out of control and knocked down part of the Arsenal walls. However, according to Georges Ageon, the earliest mention of this occurrence was thirty years later, in 1801, in addition to the weight distribution problem, boiler performance was also particularly poor, even by the standards of the day. The vehicles fire needed to be relit, and its steam raised again, every quarter of an hour or so, after running a small number of trials, variously described as being between Paris and Vincennes and at Meudon, the project was abandoned. This ended the French Armys first experiment with mechanical vehicles, even so, in 1772, King Louis XV granted Cugnot a pension of 600 livres a year for his innovative work, and the experiment was judged interesting enough for the fardier to be kept at the Arsenal. In 1800 it was transferred to the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers,241 years later, in 2010, a copy of the fardier de Cugnot was built by pupils at the Arts et Métiers ParisTech, a French Grande école, and the city of Void-Vacon. This replica worked perfectly, proving that the concept was viable and verifying the truth and this replica was exhibited at the 2010 Paris Motor Show. It is now exhibited by an organization in the native village of Cugnot, at Void-Vacon. With the French Revolution, Cugnots pension was withdrawn in 1789, and the inventor went into exile in Brussels, shortly before his death he was invited back to France by Napoleon Bonaparte, and eventually returned to Paris, where he died on 2 October 1804. History of steam road vehicles Max J. B, biography of Cugnot from World of Invention
23.
Geographic coordinate system
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A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system used in geography that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation, to specify a location on a two-dimensional map requires a map projection. The invention of a coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Ptolemy credited him with the adoption of longitude and latitude. Ptolemys 2nd-century Geography used the prime meridian but measured latitude from the equator instead. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes recovery of Ptolemys text a little before 1300, in 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911, the latitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through the center of the Earth. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the equator, the north pole is 90° N, the south pole is 90° S. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the equator, the plane of all geographic coordinate systems. The equator divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the longitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle east or west of a reference meridian to another meridian that passes through that point. All meridians are halves of great ellipses, which converge at the north and south poles, the prime meridian determines the proper Eastern and Western Hemispheres, although maps often divide these hemispheres further west in order to keep the Old World on a single side. The antipodal meridian of Greenwich is both 180°W and 180°E, the combination of these two components specifies the position of any location on the surface of Earth, without consideration of altitude or depth. The grid formed by lines of latitude and longitude is known as a graticule, the origin/zero point of this system is located in the Gulf of Guinea about 625 km south of Tema, Ghana. To completely specify a location of a feature on, in, or above Earth. Earth is not a sphere, but a shape approximating a biaxial ellipsoid. It is nearly spherical, but has an equatorial bulge making the radius at the equator about 0. 3% larger than the radius measured through the poles, the shorter axis approximately coincides with the axis of rotation
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Tourism in Paris
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Tourism in Paris is a major income source for Paris and the city ranks in the worlds most visited cities. In 2013, the City of Paris welcomed 15.6 million international visitors, the Paris Region received 32.3 million visitors in 2013, putting it just ahead of London as the worlds top tourist destination region, measured by hotel occupancy. In the Paris region, the largest numbers of tourists came in order from Britain. In 2012,263,212 salaried workers in the city of Paris, or 18.4 percent of the number, were engaged in tourism-related sectors, hotels, catering, transport. In 2014 visitors to Paris spent 17 billion dollars, the third highest sum globally after London, the Eiffel Tower is acknowledged as the universal symbol of Paris and France. It was originally designed by Émile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, in March 1885 Gustave Eiffel, known primarily as a successful iron engineer, submitted a plan for a tower to the French Ministre du Commerce et de lIndustrie. He entered a competition for students studying at the university, the winning proposal would stand as the centerpiece of the 1889 Exposition. Eiffels was one of over 100 submissions, eiffels proposal was finally chosen in June 1886. Even before its construction, the Towers uniqueness was noticed, the Eiffel Tower was finally inaugurated on March 31,1889. Currently about 6.9 million people visit the Eiffel tower each year, Centre Georges Pompidou was officially opened on January 31,1977 by President Valéry Giscard dEstaing. The designers of Pompidou are Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, the Centre Pompidou has had over 150 million visitors since 1977. Centre Georges Pompidou is a complex in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil, in 1997 renovations had begun to drastically change the interior spaces of the Centre Pompidou. The renovation also developed the capacity to host the performing arts. The Arc de Triomphe de lÉtoile is one of the most famous monuments in Paris and it stands in the centre of the Place Charles de Gaulle, at the western end of the Champs-Élysées. It should not be confused with an arch, the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel. Beneath its vault lies the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I. The Arc de Triomphe is the linchpin of the historic axis – a sequence of monuments and grand thoroughfares on a route which goes from the courtyard of the Louvre, the Musée dOrsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the left bank of the Seine. It started to be constructed in 1897 and was designed by Gae Aulenti, Victor Laloux, the Musée dOrsay is an art museum for works from 1848 to 1914 and has an emphasis on French Impressionism artwork
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Landmarks in Paris
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This article presents the main landmarks in the City of Paris within its administrative limits divided by the 20 Arrondissements of Paris. Landmarks located in the suburbs of Paris, outside of its administrative limits, the 1st arrondissement forms much of the historic centre of Paris. The old Halles were demolished in 1971 and replaced by the Forum des Halles, the central market of Paris, the biggest wholesale food market in the world, was transferred to Rungis, in the southern suburbs. The former Conciergerie prison held some prominent Ancien Régime members before their deaths during the French Revolution, the 2nd arrondissement of Paris lies to the north of the 1st. The Boulevard des Capucines, Boulevard Montmartre, Boulevard des Italiens, Rue de Richelieu, also of note are the Académie Julian, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Café Anglais and Galerie Vivienne. The 3rd arrondissement is located to the northeast of the 1st, Le Marais is a trendy district spanning the 3rd and 4th arrondissements. It is architecturally very well preserved, and some of the oldest houses and it is a very culturally open place, known for its Chinese, Jewish and gay communities. Several hotels are located in this district including Hôtel de Guénégaud, the 4th arrondissement is located to the east of the 1st. Place de la Bastille is a district of historical significance, for not just Paris. Bibliothèque de lArsenal, La Force Prison, Centre Georges Pompidou, roads running through the 4th arrondissement include Rue Charlemagne, Rue de Rivoli, Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and Rue des Rosiers. It is known for its atmosphere and many bistros. The Panthéon church is where many of Frances illustrious men and women are buried, the 6th arrondissement, to the south of the centre and Seine has numerous hotels and restaurants and also educational institutions. Among the museums located in the 6th arrondissement are the Musée Bible et Terre Sainte, Musée dAnatomie Delmas-Orfila-Rouvière, Musée Dupuytren, and Musée Edouard Branly. A symbol of the Revolution are the two Statues of Liberty located on the Île aux Cygnes in the Luxembourg Garden of the 6th arrondissement and on the Seine between the 15th and 16th arrondissements. A larger version of the statues was sent as a gift from France to the United States in 1886, the Odéon-Théâtre de lEurope is located in this district, as is the Luxembourg Palace. The Pont des Arts, Pont Neuf, and Pont Saint-Michel bridges lead across the Seine to the historic centre, the 7th arrondissement lies to the southwest of the centre, across the Seine. The Eiffel Tower is the most famous landmark of the 7th arrondissement and it was a temporary construction by Gustave Eiffel for the 1889 Universal Exposition, but was never dismantled and is now an enduring symbol of Paris, instantly recognized throughout the World. The Axe historique is a line of monuments, buildings, many hotels are located in this district including Hôtel Biron, Hôtel de Castries, Hôtel de Conti, Hôtel de Mademoiselle de Condé, Hôtel du Châtelet, and Hôtel Matignon
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Arc de Triomphe
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The Arc de Triomphe should not be confused with a smaller arch, the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, which stands west of the Louvre. Beneath its vault lies the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I and it set the tone for public monuments with triumphant patriotic messages. Inspired by the Roman Arch of Titus, the Arc de Triomphe has an height of 50 metres, width of 45 m. The smaller transverse vaults are 18.68 m high and 8.44 m wide, three weeks after the Paris victory parade in 1919, Charles Godefroy flew his Nieuport biplane under the archs primary vault, with the event captured on newsreel. Pariss Arc de Triomphe was the tallest triumphal arch until the completion of the Monumento a la Revolución in Mexico City in 1938, the Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang, completed in 1982, is modelled on the Arc de Triomphe and is slightly taller at 60 m. The Arc is located on the bank of the Seine at the centre of a dodecagonal configuration of twelve radiating avenues. It was commissioned in 1806 after the victory at Austerlitz by Emperor Napoleon at the peak of his fortunes, the architect, Jean Chalgrin, died in 1811 and the work was taken over by Jean-Nicolas Huyot. On 15 December 1840, brought back to France from Saint Helena, prior to burial in the Panthéon, the body of Victor Hugo was displayed under the Arc during the night of 22 May 1885. The sword carried by the Republic in the Marseillaise relief broke off on the day, it is said, the relief was immediately hidden by tarpaulins to conceal the accident and avoid any undesired ominous interpretations. On 7 August 1919, Charles Godefroy successfully flew his biplane under the Arc, Jean Navarre was the pilot who was tasked to make the flight, but he died on 10 July 1919 when he crashed near Villacoublay while training for the flight. Following its construction, the Arc de Triomphe became the point of French troops parading after successful military campaigns. Famous victory marches around or under the Arc have included the Germans in 1871, the French in 1919, the Germans in 1940, and the French and Allies in 1944 and 1945. A United States postage stamp of 1945 shows the Arc de Triomphe in the background as victorious American troops march down the Champs-Élysées, after the interment of the Unknown Soldier, however, all military parades have avoided marching through the actual arch. The route taken is up to the arch and then around its side, out of respect for the tomb, both Hitler in 1940 and de Gaulle in 1944 observed this custom. By the early 1960s, the monument had grown very blackened from coal soot and automobile exhaust, and during 1965–1966 it was cleaned through bleaching. In the prolongation of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, a new arch, after the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel and the Arc de Triomphe de lÉtoile, the Grande Arche is the third arch built on the same perspective. In 1995, the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria placed a bomb near the Arc de Triomphe which wounded 17 people as part of a campaign of bombings, the astylar design is by Jean Chalgrin, in the Neoclassical version of ancient Roman architecture. Major academic sculptors of France are represented in the sculpture of the Arc de Triomphe, Jean-Pierre Cortot, François Rude, Antoine Étex, James Pradier and Philippe Joseph Henri Lemaire
27.
Paris Bourse
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The Paris Bourse is the historical Paris stock exchange, known as Euronext Paris from 2000 onwards. The building, known as the Palais Brongniart, is located in the Place de la Bourse, in the II arrondissement, historically, stock trading took place at several spots in Paris, including rue Quincampoix, rue Vivienne, and the back of the Opéra Garnier. Brogniart had spontaneously submitted his project, which was a rectangular neoclassical Roman temple with a giant Corinthian colonnade enclosing a vaulted and arcaded central chamber and his designs were greatly admired by Napoleon and won Brogniart a major public commission at the end of his career. Initially praised, the building was attacked for academic dullness. The authorities had required Brogniart to modify his designs, and after Brogniarts death in 1813, Labarre altered them even further, from 1901 to 1905 Jean-Baptiste-Frederic Cavel designed the addition of two lateral wings, resulting in a cruciform plan with innumerable columns. According to the architectural historian Andrew Ayers, these alterations did nothing to improve the reputation of this uninspiring monument. From the second half of the 19th century, official stock markets in Paris were operated by the Compagnie des agents de change, the number of dealers in each of the different trading areas of the Bourse was limited. There were around 60 agents de change, in Paris, only agents de change could receive a commission, at a rate fixed by law, for acting as an intermediary. However, parallel arrangements were usual in order to some clients quote. The Commodities Exchange was housed in the building until 1889. Moreover, until about the middle of the 20th century, a market known as La Coulisse was in operation. Until the late 1980s, the market operated as an open outcry exchange, in 1986, the Paris Bourse started to implement an electronic trading system. This was known generically as CATS, but the Paris version was called CAC, by 1989, quotations were fully automated. The Palais Brongniart hosted the French financial derivatives exchanges MATIF and MONEP, in the late 1990s, the Paris Bourse launched the Euronext initiative, an alliance of several European stock exchanges. List of works by James Pradier External sculpture Lehmann, P. -J,1991 La Bourse de Paris, Paris, Dunod. 1997 Histoire de la Bourse de Paris, Paris, PUF, muniesa, F.2005 Contenir le marché, la transition de la criée à la cotation électronique à la Bourse de Paris, Sociologie du Travail 47, 485-501. Walker, D. A.2001 A factual account of the functioning of the nineteenth-century Paris Bourse, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 8, 186-207. Foucault, T. and Hillion, P.1997 Microstructure des marchés financiers, institutions, modèles et tests empiriques, Paris, hamon, J.1995 Marché dactions, architecture et microstructure, Paris, Economica
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Catacombs of Paris
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The Catacombs of Paris are underground ossuaries in Paris, France, which hold the remains of more than six million people in a small part of the ancient Mines of Paris tunnel network. Nightly processions of bones from 1786 to 1788 transferred remains from cemeteries to the reinforced tunnels, the Catacombs are among the 14 City of Paris Museums managed by Paris Musées since January 1,2013. The catacombs are known formally as lOssuaire Municipal or Catacombes officiels and have been called The Worlds Largest Grave due to the number of remains buried. Although the ossuary comprises only a section of the underground carrières de Paris. Paris earliest burial grounds were to the outskirts of the Roman-era Left Bank city. Thus, instead of burying its dead away from inhabited areas as usual, by the end of the same century Saints Innocents was neighbour to the principal Parisan marketplace Les Halles, and already filled to overflowing. To make room for more burials, the long-dead were exhumed and their bones packed into the roofs, much of the Left Bank area rests upon rich Lutetian limestone deposits. This stone built much of the city, but it was extracted in suburban locations away from any habitation, Paris had annexed its suburbs many times over the centuries, and by the 18th century many of its arrondissements were or included previously mined territories. This resulted in the creation of the inspection Générale des Carrières service, the need to eliminate Les Innocents gained urgency from May 30,1780, when a basement wall in a property adjoining the cemetery collapsed under the weight of the mass grave behind it. The cemetery was closed to the public and all intra muros burials were forbidden after 1780, the problem of what to do with the remains crowding intra muros cemeteries was still unresolved. Lenoir endorsed the idea of moving Parisian dead to the subterranean passageways that were renovated during 1782, after deciding to further renovate the Tombe-Issoire passageways for their future role as an underground sepulchre, the idea became law during late 1785. It would take two years to empty the majority of Paris cemeteries, cemeteries whose remains were moved to the Catacombs include Saints-Innocents, Saint-Étienne-des-Grès, Madeleine Cemetery, Errancis Cemetery, and Notre-Dame-des-Blancs-Manteaux. In addition to directing the stacking of skulls and femurs into the patterns seen in the catacombs today, also created was a room dedicated to the display of the various minerals found under Paris, and another showing various skeletal deformities found during the catacombs creation and renovation. Later they opened for daily visits. After an incident of vandalism, the Catacombs were closed to the public during September 2009, the entry to the catacombs is in the western pavilion of the former Barrière dEnfer city gate. Soon after, they find themselves before a stone portal, the ossuary entry, CEST İCİ LEMPİRE DE LA MORT. Beyond begin the halls and caverns of walls of carefully arranged bones, along the way there are other monuments created in the years before catacomb renovations, such as a source-gathering fountain baptised La Samaritaine because of later-added engravings. There are also rusty gates blocking passages leading to other parts of the catacombs – many of these are either un-renovated or were too un-navigable for regular tours
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Conciergerie
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The Conciergerie is a building in Paris, France, located on the west of the Île de la Cité, formerly a prison but presently used mostly for law courts. It was part of the royal palace, the Palais de la Cité, which consisted of the Conciergerie, Palais de Justice. Hundreds of prisoners during the French Revolution were taken from the Conciergerie to be executed by guillotine at a number of locations around Paris, the west part of the island was originally the site of a Merovingian palace, and was known initially as the Palais de la Cité. From the 10th to the 14th centuries it was the palace of the medieval Kings of France. During the reigns of Louis IX and Philippe IV the Merovingian palace was extended and fortified more extensively, Louis IX added the Sainte-Chapelle and associated galleries, while Philippe IV created the towered facade on the Seine river side and a large hall. Both are excellent examples of French religious and secular architecture of the period, the Sainte-Chapelle was built in the French royal style to house the crown of thorns that was brought back from the Crusades and to serve as a royal chapel. The Grande Salle was one of the largest in Europe, and its lower story and it was used as a dining room for the 2,000 staff members who worked in the palace. It was heated with four fireplaces and lit by many windows. It was also used for banquets and judicial proceedings. The neighboring Salle des Gardes was used as an antechamber to the Great Hall immediately above, the early Valois kings continued to modify the palace during the 14th century, but Charles V abandoned the palace during 1358, relocating across the river to the Louvre Palace. The palace continued to serve a function and still included the chancellery. In the kings absence, he appointed a concierge to command of the palace, during 1391, part of the building was converted for use as a prison and took its name from the ruling office. Its prisoners were a mixture of common criminals and political prisoners, in common with other prisons of the time, the treatment of prisoners was dependent on their wealth, status and associates. Wealthy or influential prisoners usually got their own cells with a bed, desk, less-well-off prisoners could afford to pay for simply furnished cells known as pistoles, which would be equipped with a rough bed and perhaps a table. The poorest, known as the pailleux from the paille that they slept on, would be confined to dark, damp, vermin-infested cells known as oubliettes. In keeping with the name, they were left to live or die in conditions that were ideal for the plague and other infectious diseases, the building was extended during the reigns of later kings with Frances first public clocks being installed about 1370. The current clock dates from 1535, despite lasting only ten months, the Reign of Terror had a profound effect on France. More than 40,000 people died from execution and imprisonment, the National Convention enacted the Law of Suspects on September 17,1793
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Eiffel Tower
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The Eiffel Tower is a wrought iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France. It is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed, the Eiffel Tower is the most-visited paid monument in the world,6.91 million people ascended it in 2015. The tower is 324 metres tall, about the height as an 81-storey building. Its base is square, measuring 125 metres on each side, due to the addition of a broadcasting aerial at the top of the tower in 1957, it is now taller than the Chrysler Building by 5.2 metres. Excluding transmitters, the Eiffel Tower is the second-tallest structure in France after the Millau Viaduct, the tower has three levels for visitors, with restaurants on the first and second levels. The top levels upper platform is 276 m above the ground – the highest observation deck accessible to the public in the European Union, tickets can be purchased to ascend by stairs or lift to the first and second levels. The climb from ground level to the first level is over 300 steps, although there is a staircase to the top level, it is usually only accessible by lift. Eiffel openly acknowledged that inspiration for a tower came from the Latting Observatory built in New York City in 1853, sauvestre added decorative arches to the base of the tower, a glass pavilion to the first level, and other embellishments. Little progress was made until 1886, when Jules Grévy was re-elected as president of France and Édouard Lockroy was appointed as minister for trade. On 12 May, a commission was set up to examine Eiffels scheme and its rivals, which, after some debate about the exact location of the tower, a contract was signed on 8 January 1887. Eiffel was to all income from the commercial exploitation of the tower during the exhibition. He later established a company to manage the tower, putting up half the necessary capital himself. The proposed tower had been a subject of controversy, drawing criticism from those who did not believe it was feasible and these objections were an expression of a long-standing debate in France about the relationship between architecture and engineering. And for twenty years … we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the column of bolted sheet metal. Gustave Eiffel responded to criticisms by comparing his tower to the Egyptian pyramids. Will it not also be grandiose in its way, and why would something admirable in Egypt become hideous and ridiculous in Paris. Indeed, Garnier was a member of the Tower Commission that had examined the various proposals, some of the protesters changed their minds when the tower was built, others remained unconvinced. Guy de Maupassant supposedly ate lunch in the restaurant every day because it was the one place in Paris where the tower was not visible
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Flame of Liberty
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The monument, which measures approximately 3.5 metres in height, is a sculpture of a flame, executed in gilded copper, supported by a pedestal of gray-and-black marble. It is located near the end of the Pont de lAlma, on the Place de lAlma. It was offered to the city of Paris in 1989 by the International Herald Tribune on behalf of donors who had contributed approximately $400,000 for its fabrication and it represented the culmination of that newspapers 1987 celebration of its hundredth anniversary of publishing an English-language daily newspaper in Paris. This project was overseen by the director of the French craft unions at that time, Jacques Graindorge. He foresaw an installation of the Flame of Liberty in a square called Place des États-Unis in the 16th arrondissement. After a protracted period of negotiations, it was decided that the Flame would be placed in an area near the intersection of lAvenue de New-York. The monument was dedicated on May 10,1989 by Chirac, on the base of the monument, a commemorative plaque recounts the following story, The Flame of Liberty. An exact replica of the Statue of Libertys flame offered to the people of France by donors throughout the world as a symbol of the Franco-American friendship, on the occasion of the centennial of the International Herald Tribune. Anthropologist Guy Lesoeurs said, Most people who come here think this was built for her, a new Flame of Liberty, a sculpture by Jean Cardot, was unveiled on June 14,2008. It symbolizes the warm and respectful relations between the French and the Americans
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Grand Palais
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The structure was built in the style of Beaux-Arts architecture as taught by the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris. One of its pediments calls it a “monument dedicated by the Republic to the glory of French art”, reflecting its original purpose, a monumental bronze quadriga by Georges Récipon tops each wing of the main façade. The one on the Champs-Élysées side depicts Immortality prevailing over Time, the grand inauguration took place 1 May 1900, and from the very beginning the palace was the site of different kinds of shows in addition to the intended art exhibitions. These included a competition that took place annually from 1901 to 1957, but were mainly dedicated to innovation and modernity, the automobile, aviation, household appliances. The golden age of the art exhibitions as such lasted for thirty years. The builders attempted to compensate for this subsidence, and for a tendency of the ground to shift, by sinking supporting posts down to firmer soil and these measures were only partially successful. Further damage occurred once the building was in use, additional problems due to the construction of the building itself revealed themselves over the course of time. Differential rates of expansion and contraction between cast iron and steel members, for example, allowed for water to enter, leading to corrosion and further weakening. When finally one of the ceiling panels fell in 1993, the main space had to be closed for restoration work. The Palais served as a hospital during World War I. The Nazis put the Palais to use during the Occupation of France in World War II, first used as a truck depot, the Palais then housed two Nazi propaganda exhibitions. The Parisian resistance used the Grand Palais as a headquarters during the Liberation of Paris, on 23 August 1944 an advancing German column was fired upon from a window on the Avenue de Sèlves, and the Germans responded with a tank attack upon the Palais. The attack ignited hay that was set up for a circus show, by 26 August, American jeeps were parked in the nave, followed by tanks from the French 2nd Armored Division, completing the liberation of the building. The buildings west wing contains a science museum, the Palais de la Découverte. The couture fashion house Chanel annually hosts many of its fashion shows here, setting up elaborate and expensive surroundings for its models and it was the host venue of the 2010 World Fencing Championships. This article contains material abridged and translated from the French and Spanish Wikipedia, official Grand Palais website The Grand Palais, current photographs, and photographs from the 1900s. New recent pictures and great information on the Grand Palais Paris Félix Charpentier, photos from the rooftops of the Grand Palais
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Petit Palais
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The Petit Palais is an art museum in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, France. Built for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, it now houses the City of Paris Museum of Fine Arts, the Petit Palais is located across from the Grand Palais on Avenue Nicolas II, today Avenue Winston-Churchill. The other façades of the face the Seine and Avenue des Champs-Elysees. The Petit Palais is one of 14 museums of the City of Paris that have incorporated since January 1,2013. In 1894 a competition was held for the 1900 Exhibition area, the Palais de lIndustrie from the 1855 World’s Fair was considered unfitting and was to be replaced by something new for the 1900 Exhibition. Architects had the option to do what they pleased with the Palais de l’Industrie, in the end, Charles Girault won the competition and built the Petit Palais as one of the buildings that replaced the Palais de l’Industrie. The construction of the Petit Palais began on October 10,1897 and was completed in April 1900, the total cost of the Petit Palais at the time of the construction was 400,000 pounds. Charles Girault largely draws on the seventeenth and early eighteenth century French style for the Petit Palais. Additionally his work, such as the central porch and the triple arcade, has many references to the stables at Chantilly. Girault’s plan for the Petit Palais had minimal alterations from the design to the execution, the plan was original and fit perfectly in its given location. The Petit Palais is a shape with its larger side as the main façade facing the Grand Palais. The building’s shape makes a semi-circular courtyard at the center, the Beaux-Arts style Petit Palais was designed by Charles Girault, and is around an octi-circular courtyard and garden, similar to the Grand Palais. Its ionic columns, grand porch, and dome echo those of the Invalides across the river, the tympanum depicting the city of Paris surrounded by muses is the work of sculptor Jean Antoine Injalbert. The Petit Palais was built to be a building that would become a permanent fine arts museum after the exhibition. The materials of the building—stone, steel, and concrete as well as the decoration were to demonstrate that the Petit Palais was built to be enduring, the main façade of the building faces the Grand Palais. The focal point of the façade is the entrance, “a central archway set in an archivolt topped by a dome. Two wings flank the main entrance and these wings, continuing to the end pavilions, are embellished with free-standing columns that frame the tall windows. The exterior of the pavilions are embellished with arched windows from the side around to the rear façades and these grand windows provide side lighting for the outer three galleries of the interior museum
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Institut de France
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The Institut de France is a French learned society, grouping five académies, the most famous of which is the Académie française. The Institute, located in Paris, manages approximately 1,000 foundations, as well as museums and it also awards prizes and subsidies, which amounted to a total of €5,028,190.55 for 2002. Most of these prizes are awarded by the Institute on the recommendation of the académies, the Institut de France was established on 25 October 1795, by the French government. Académie française – initiated 1635, suppressed 1793, restored 1803 as a division of the institute, Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres – initiated 1663. Académie des sciences – initiated 1666, the Royal Society of Canada, initiated 1882, was modeled after the Institut de France and the Royal Society of London
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Les Invalides
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Louis XIV initiated the project by an order dated 24 November 1670, as a home and hospital for aged and unwell soldiers, the name is a shortened form of hôpital des invalides. The architect of Les Invalides was Libéral Bruant, the selected site was in the then suburban plain of Grenelle. By the time the project was completed in 1676, the river front measured 196 metres and the complex had fifteen courtyards. It was then felt that the veterans required a chapel, Jules Hardouin-Mansart assisted the aged Bruant, and the chapel was finished in 1679 to Bruants designs after the elder architects death. This chapel was known as Église Saint-Louis des Invalides, and daily attendance of the veterans in the services was required. Shortly after the chapel was completed, Louis XIV commissioned Mansart to construct a separate private royal chapel referred to as the Église du Dôme from its most striking feature. The domed chapel was finished in 1708, because of its location and significance, the Invalides served as the scene for several key events in French history. On 14 July 1789 it was stormed by Parisian rioters who seized the cannons, Napoleon was entombed under the dome of the Invalides with great ceremony in 1840. In December 1894 the degradation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus was held before the main building, the building retained its primary function of a retirement home and hospital for military veterans until the early twentieth century. In 1872 the musée dartillerie was located within the building to be joined by the musée historique des armées in 1896, the two institutions were merged to form the present musée de larmée in 1905. At the same time the veterans in residence were dispersed to smaller centres outside Paris, the building accordingly became too large for its original purpose. The modern complex does however include the facilities detailed below for about a hundred elderly or incapacitated former soldiers. On the north front of Les Invalides Hardouin-Mansarts chapel dome is large enough to dominate the long façade, at its far end, the Pont Alexandre III links this grand urbanistic axis with the Petit Palais and the Grand Palais. The Pont des Invalides is next, downstream the Seine river, the Hôpital des Invalides spurred William III of England to emulation, in the military Greenwich Hospital of 1694. The buildings still comprise the Institution Nationale des Invalides, an institution for disabled war veterans. The institution comprises, a retirement home a medical and surgical centre a centre for medical consultations. In 1676 Jules Hardouin-Mansart was commissioned with the construction of a place of worship on the site and he designed a building which combined a royal chapel with a veterans chapel. In this way, the King and his soldiers could attend mass simultaneously, while entering the place of worship though different entrances, when the Army Museum at Les Invalides was founded in 1905, the veterans chapel was placed under its administrative control
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Louvre Pyramid
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The Louvre Pyramid is a large glass and metal pyramid designed by Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, surrounded by three smaller pyramids, in the main courtyard of the Louvre Palace in Paris. The large pyramid serves as the entrance to the Louvre Museum. Completed in 1989, it has become a landmark of the city of Paris, commissioned by the President of France, François Mitterrand, in 1984, it was designed by the architect I. M. Pei. The structure, which was constructed entirely with glass segments and metal poles, reaches a height of 21.6 metres and its square base has sides of 34 metres and a base surface area of 1,000 square metres. It consists of 603 rhombus-shaped and 70 triangular glass segments, the pyramid structure was engineered by Nicolet Chartrand Knoll Ltd. of Montreal and Rice Francis Ritchie of Paris. Visitors entering through the pyramid descend into the spacious lobby then re-ascend into the main Louvre buildings, for design historian Mark Pimlott, I. M. Pei’s plan distributes people effectively from the central concourse to myriad destinations within its vast subterranean network. Several other museums have duplicated this concept, most notably the Museum of Science, the Dolphin Centre, featuring a similar pyramid, was opened in April 1982, by Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester. The construction work on the base and underground lobby was carried out by the Vinci construction company. In 1839, according to one account, in ceremonies commemorating the glorious revolution of 1830, The tombs of the Louvre were covered with black hangings. In front and in the middle was erected a monument of a pyramidical shape. The construction of the pyramid triggered many years of strong and lively aesthetic, Pei being insufficiently French to be entrusted with the task of updating the treasured Parisian landmark. Meanwhile, Political critics referred to the structure as Pharaoh Francois Pyramid, while some continue to feel the harsh modernism of the edifice is out of place, others consider the juxtaposition of contrasting architectural styles a successful merger of the old and the new. During the design phase, there was a proposal that the design include a spire on the pyramid to simplify window washing, Pei objected, however, and this proposal was eliminated. It has been claimed by some that the glass panes in the Louvre Pyramid number exactly 666, the story of the 666 panes originated in the 1980s, when the official brochure published during construction did indeed cite this number. The number 666 was also mentioned in various newspapers, the Louvre museum, however, states that the finished pyramid contains 673 glass panes. A higher figure was obtained by David A. Shugarts, who reports that the pyramid contains 689 pieces of glass, Shugarts obtained the figure from the Peis offices. The side with the entrance, however, has 11 panes fewer, however, David A. Shugarts reports that according to a spokeswoman of the offices of Pei, the French President never specified the number of panes to be used in the pyramid. La Pyramide Inversée is a skylight in the Carrousel du Louvre shopping mall in front of the Louvre Museum and it looks like an upside-down and smaller version of the Louvre Pyramid
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Palais Garnier
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The Palais Garnier is a 1, 979-seat opera house, which was built from 1861 to 1875 for the Paris Opera. The Paris Opera now mainly uses the Palais Garnier for ballet, the Palais Garnier has been called probably the most famous opera house in the world, a symbol of Paris like Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, or the Sacré Coeur Basilica. This opinion is far from unanimous however, the 20th-century French architect Le Corbusier once described it as a lying art, the Palais Garnier is a building of exceptional opulence. The style is monumental and considered Second-Empire Beaux-Arts style with axial symmetry in plan and these include very elaborate multicolored marble friezes, columns, and lavish statuary, many of which portray deities of Greek mythology. The principal facade is on the side of the building, overlooking the Place de lOpéra. Fourteen painters, mosaicists and seventy-three sculptors participated in the creation of its ornamentation, the two gilded figural groups, Charles Gumerys LHarmonie and La Poésie, crown the apexes of the principal facades left and right avant-corps. They are both made of gilt copper electrotype, the facade also incorporates other work by Gumery, Alexandre Falguière, and others. On the left and right lateral returns of the front facade are busts of the librettists Eugène Scribe and Philippe Quinault, when the Empire fell, work stopped, leaving unfinished dressed stonework. It is covered by a 13.5 metre diameter dome, two pairs of obelisks marking the entrances of the Rotunda to the north and the south. The interior consists of interweaving corridors, stairwells, alcoves and landings allowing the movement of large numbers of people, rich with velvet, gold leaf, and cherubim and nymphs, the interior is characteristic of Baroque sumptuousness. The building features a ceremonial staircase of white marble with a balustrade of red and green marble. Its design was inspired by Victor Louiss grand staircase for the Théâtre de Bordeaux, the pedestals of the staircase are decorated with female torchères, created by Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse. When they were first fixed in two months before the opening of the building it was obvious to Garnier that they were too dark for the space. With the help of two of his students, Pils had to rework the canvases while they were in place overhead on the ceiling and, at the age of 61, he fell ill. His students had to finish the work, which was completed the day before the opening and this hall 18 meters high,154 meters long and 13 meters wide was designed to act as a drawing room for Paris society. Its ceiling was painted by Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry and represents various moments in the history of music, the foyer opens into an outside loggia at each end of which are the Salon de la Lune and Salon du Soleil. The auditorium has a traditional Italian horseshoe shape and can seat 1,979, the stage is the largest in Europe and can accommodate as many as 450 artists. The canvas house curtain was painted to represent a draped curtain, complete with tassels, the ceiling area, which surrounds the chandelier, was originally painted by Jules Eugène Lenepveu
