French Inventions - Arts & Entertainment

Arts & Entertainment

• Gothic art in the mid-12th century.
• Oboe, or hautbois, in the mid-17th century France, probably by Jacques-Martin Hotteterre and his family or by the Philidor family. Variants of the oboe like the graïle, the bombard and the piston were later created in Languedoc and Brittany.

• Many bagpipes were developed in France, including the Biniou, the bodega, the Boha, the Bousine, the Cabrette, the Chabrette, the Cornemuse du Centre, the loure, the Musette bechonnet, the Musette bressane and the Musette de cour.
• First mechanical metronome by Étienne Loulié in 1696 (but the modern form of the metronome was patented only in 1815).
• Rococo in the early 18th century.
• Clavecin électrique, earliest surviving electric-powered musical instrument, in 1759 by Jean-Baptiste Thillaie Delaborde
• The Roulette was developed in 18th century France from a primitive form created by Blaise Pascal (17th century). In 1843, Louis and François Blanc introduced the single 0 style roulette wheel.
• Many other gambling games and card games (including the French suits around 1480) were invented in France, some from earlier games :
  • From earlier Italian games : Basset, Biribi and Tarot (see Tarot of Marseilles and French tarot)
  • From earlier Spanish games : Quinze and, maybe, Piquet
  • Other : Faro (from the Basset), Brelan, Bouillotte, Commerce, Trente et Quarante, Belote and maybe Blackjack.
• Photography :
  • Photolithography and the first photographic image ever produced in 1822 by Nicéphore Niépce (Saône-et-Loire)
  • Daguerreotype by Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre
  • Hércules Florence coined photographie in 1834, French word at the origin of the English word photography.

• Collotype process by Alphonse Poitevin in 1856.
• The Praxinoscope of Charles-Émile Reynaud (1877) is an animation device intermediary between the zoetrope and the cinema.
• The Cabaret by Rodolphe Salis in 1881 in Paris.
• The Chronophotography by Étienne-Jules Marey (developed by himself, Eadweard Muybridge, Albert Londe, Georges Demeny and Ottomar Anschutz) in 1882 in Paris.
• The Cinema developed from chronophotography :
  • First motion picture camera and first projector by Louis Le Prince, Frenchman who worked in the United Kingdom and the United States.
  • The Cinematograph by Léon Bouly (1892).
  • first commercial, public screening of cinematographic films by Auguste and Louis Lumière in Paris on 28 December 1895.
  • Georges Méliès : first filmmaker to use the stop trick, or substitution, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted color in his films. His most famous film, A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la Lune), in 1902, was the first science fiction film and the most popular movie of its time (another of his production, Le Manoir du diable is also sometimes considered as the first horror movie).
• Developments of the modern Piano (invented by the Italian Bartolomeo Cristofori) : Pleyel et Cie (double piano), Sébastien Érard (double escapement action), Jean-Louis Boisselot (sostenuto pedal), Henri Fourneaux (Player piano).
• Ondes Martenot in 1928 by Maurice Martenot (early electronic musical instrument ).
• Clavioline, an electronic keyboard instrument, by Constant Martin in 1947.
• DivX around 1998 by Jerome Rota at Montpellier.