Paris

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Paris was a hub of engine production and aero innovation broadly.

Places

Significant places in the Paris area include: Chalais-Meudon, Parc de Saint-Cloud, Champ-de-Mars, Eiffel Tower,

Seine is the name of the département corresponding best with central Paris, and therefore appearing on the French patents filed by Parisian inventors.

Engine manufacturing

According to one narrative, the circumstances of early automobile manufacturing led to Paris's leadership in the field of engines:

Paris was the center of the nascent automobile industry. That this was the case had virtually nothing to do with French culture or social conditions—possibly excepting the French roads, the best in the world at that time. Rather, early French hegemony resulted from the historical accident of a unique network of social relationships emanating from the Germans Benz and Daimler through the French and Belgian intermediaries Emile Roger and Edouard Sarazin to the French industry leaders Emile Constant Levassor and Armand Peugeot.[1]

It is said that Levassor, Peugeot, and Daimler met in 1888, setting the stage for these French manufacturers to produce automobiles with Daimler engines.

Attitude favorable to technological innovation

Alberto Santos-Dumont was celebrated for flying his airships casually around Paris as a means of transportation. He wrote in 1904 that he found the local climate particularly encouraging:

In France and in France only, are not only the authorities, but the great mass of citizens, so much alive to their advantage in the development of this national industry that, day by day, year in and year out, they permit ten thousand automobiles to go tearing through the highroads at a really dangerous speed. In Paris, in particular, one sees a "scorching" average in its great Park and its very avenues and streets that causes Londoners and tourists from New York to stand aghast.

In this same order of ideas I may here state that, in spite of the tragic air-ship accidents of 1902, I have never once been limited or in any way impeded in the course of my experiments by the Parisian authorities; while as for the public, no matter hwere I land with an air-ship—in the country roads of the suburbs, in private gardens, even of great villas, int he avenues and parks and public places of the capital—I meet with unvarying friendly aid, protection, and enthusiasm.
[...]

I need not say that it is a great thing for an air-ship experimenter thus to have the confidence and friendly aid of a whole population. Over certain European frontiers spherical balloons have even been shot at. And I have often wondered what kind of a reception one of my air-ships would meet with in the country districts of England itself.[2]

References

  1. ↑ Flink, 1988, The Automobile Age, p. 15.
  2. ↑ Santos-Dumont, 1904, My airships, pp. 322–323.

These events were held in Paris:

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