Scholars at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris (1666-1793)

This note summarizes our research into the scholars of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris from its early meetings to its dissolution

Douglas Wilson Johnson. A Forgotten Member of the Royal Serbian Academy of Sciences

The paper presents a little-known foreign member of the Royal Serbian Academy of Sciences, the American geomorphologist Douglas Wilson Johnson (1876-1944), his role as an expert on border delimitation issues in support of the claims of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes at the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919, his collaboration with Yugoslav experts, notably Jovan Cvijić, and his election to the Royal Serbian Academy of Sciences shortly after the First World War

Joan Vernet i Ginés (1923-2011). In memoriam

Joan Vernet i Ginés was born in Barcelona in 1923 and died there on the 23rd of July 2011. He had a PhD in Philosophy and Humanities (Madrid, 1948), was a Full Professor at the University of Barcelona since 1954 and an Emeritus Professor since his retirement in 1988. He was a full number of the Academy of Belles-Lettres of Barcelona (1959), the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences of Paris (1960), the Scientific Council of the Spanish National Research Council (1978), the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (1978), the Royal Academy of History (1981), the Royal Asiatic Society of London (1986) and the Société Asiatique of Paris (1991), and a corresponding member of the Academy of Science of Madrid (1981), the Academy of Science of Baghdad (1985), the Academy of Science of Barcelona (1986) and the Academy of Islamic Studies of Amman (1991). He was also the first to hold the chair at the Institut du Monde Arabe of Paris (1990), he opened the lecture series in the great mosque of this city (1990-1991) and he served as the president of the Fifth International Symposium of History of Arabic Science held in 1992

The style of charles perrault’s tales and their reflection of the period in which the writer lived

Perrault was born January 12, 1628 in Paris to a wealthy bourgeois family, the seventh child of Pierre Perrault and Paquette Le Clerc. He attended very good schools and studied law before embarking on a career in government service, following in the footsteps of his father and elder brother Jean. He took part in the creation of the Academy of Sciences as well as the restoration of the Academy of Painting. In 1654, he moved in with his brother Pierre, who had purchased the position of chief tax collector of the city of Paris. When the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres was founded in 1663, Perrault was appointed its secretary and served under Jean Baptiste Colbert, finance minister to King Louis XIV

Pierre Simon Laplace 1749-1827. A Determined Scientist

S’il fallut attendre vingt-deux ans pour que le grand livre de Roger Hahn consacré à l’Académie des sciences de Paris soit traduit en français, force est de constater que sa biographie de Laplace a suivi un circuit de diffusion très différent (The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution. The Paris Academy of Science, 1666-1803, Berkeley, 1971 ; trad. fr. L’anatomie d’une institution scientifique : l’Académie des sciences de Paris, 1666-1803, Paris-Bruxelles, Éditions des Archives contemporaines, ..

Technical innovations at the service of cheaper labour in pre-industrial Europe. The Enlightened agenda to transform the gender division of labour in silk manufacturing

In 1749, Jacques de Vaucanson patented his or tour pour tirer la soie or spindle for silk reeling. In that same year he presented his invention to the Academy of the Sciences in Paris, of which he was a member1. Jacques de Vaucanson was born in Grenoble, France, in 1709, and died in Paris in 1782. In 1741 he had been appointed inspector of silk manufactures by Louis XV. He set about reorganizing the silk industry in France, in considerable difficulty at the time due to foreign competition. Given Vaucanson's position, his invention was intended to replace the traditional Piémontes method, and had an immediate impact upon the silk industry in France and all over Europe

The “Real Academia das Sciencias de Lisboa” and the adventure of Pierre Auguste Broussonet, a pioneer of Brazil's Ichthyology and of the scientific relationships between Portugal and France.

Pierre Auguste Broussonet appears to be the first researcher engaged in the study of the fishes from the Portuguese collections on Natural History, and especially the Royal Museum of Ajuda collections, including the utmost important one collected in Brazil by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira. He also dealt with the collection of fishes from the Royal Academy of Sciences, the institution that supported him during his stay of approximately four months in Lisbon, where he arrived sometime in September or October 1794. An experienced Naturalist, especially on Ichthyology, he produced a pioneer work on an entirely unknown collection, that of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Lisbon. This collection had certainly been transferred from the Royal Natural History Museum at Ajuda. Our present status of knowledge is largely based on documents from the Bibliothèque Centrale of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris. The document on fishes from the Academy's Museum (Table 3) is evidence for the intervention of Broussonet. This document is therefore and by far the more important one as far as Broussonet's intervention is concerned. Broussonet is thus a remarkable pioneer of the scientific cooperation between Portugal and France

Geography and the Paris Academy of Sciences: politics and patronage in early 18th-century France

This essay considers the politics and patronage of geography in early-modern France. It examines how the Paris Academy of Sciences, widely acknowledged as the 18th century’s pre-eminent scientific society, came to recognise geography as an independent science in 1730, a century before the establishment of the first geographical societies. Although the Academy was centrally concerned with cartography from its inception in 1666, it initially afforded no official status to geography, which was viewed either as a specialised form of historical inquiry or as a minor component within the hegemonic science of astronomy. The rise of Newtonian mathematics and the associated controversy about the shape of the earth challenged the Academy’s epistemological foundations and prompted a debate about the educational and political significance of geography as a scientific practice. The death in 1726 of Guillaume Delisle, a prominent Academy astronomer-cartographer and a popular geography tutor to the young Louis XV, led to a spirited campaign to elect Philippe Buache, Delisle’s prot�eg�e, to a new Academy position as a geographer rather than an astronomer. The campaign emphasised the social and political utility of geography, though the Academy’s decision to recognise this new and distinctively modern science was ultimately facilitated by traditional networks of patronage within the French Royal Court

Scientific Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Paris

The Scientific Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Pari