Jean Baptiste Meusnier

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Meusnier's dirigible

Jean Baptiste Marie Charles Meusnier de la Place (Tours, 19 June 1754 — le Pont de Cassel, near Mayence, 13 June 1793) was a French mathematician, engineer and Revolutionary general. He is best known for Meusnier's theorem on the curvature of surfaces, which he formulated while he was at the École Royale du Génie (Royal School of Engineering). He also discovered the helicoid. He worked with Lavoisier on the decomposition of water and the evolution of hydrogen.

Meusnier is sometimes portrayed as the inventor of the dirigible, because of an uncompleted project he conceived in 1784, not long after the first balloon flights of the Montgolfiers, and presented to the Académie des Sciences (Academy of Sciences). This concerned an elliptical balloon (ballonet') 84 metres long, with a capacity of 1,700 cubic metres, powered by three propellors driven by 80 men. The basket, in the form of a boat, was suspended from the canopy on a system of three ropes. Henri Giffard's design for the first successful powered airship was inspirated by Meusnier's ideas.^[1]

During his military career he was put in charge of coastal defences in 1791. Fighting the Prussians on the Rhine, he was injured during the siege of Mainz (1793) and died of his wounds. ^[2]