Georges Claude

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Georges Claude (1926)

Georges Claude (born September 24, 1870 in Paris , 11th arrondissement , † May 23, 1960 in Saint-Cloud ) was a French physicist and businessman and is considered the inventor of the neon tube . On January 19, 1915, the US patent was granted to him.

life and work

Georges Claude's father, himself a teacher and unsuccessful inventor, forbade him to attend school. Despite not having finished school, he studied at the Paris University of Physics and Chemistry. He later even became a member of the Academy of Sciences.

The neon tube was created as a waste product from his attempts to isolate pure oxygen from the air. In 1902 he founded with Paul Delorme , the company Air Liquide , which he acquired a large fortune.

As an ardent and deeply anti-democratic admirer of Hitler , Mussolini and Franco , the 70-year-old Claude traveled through France to promote collaboration with Nazi Germany at his own expense. His contempt for democracy later led him to support the right-wing Action française , to which he donated large sums of money on several occasions. In 1940 the German Wehrmacht occupied France as part of the western campaign . During the occupation, Claude held important advisory positions for the government of Vichy . After the liberation of Paris , he was arrested in Nancy in September 1944 and sentenced to life imprisonment on June 26, 1945 by the Court of Justice of the Seine department . The sentence was later downgraded to 10 years and on January 3, 1950, the 79-year-old was released because of his age. In addition to his prison sentence, he was also expelled from the Legion of Honor and the Academy of Sciences. Claude spent the last years of his life on his estate in La Ferté-Saint-Aubin in the Loiret department .

Web links

Commons : Georges Claude  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Patent US1125476 : System of illuminating by luminescent tubes. Registered November 9, 1911 , published January 19, 1915 , inventor: Georges Claude. ‌
  2. ^ The Air Liquide company (historical overview). airliquide.de, archived from the original on December 12, 2009 ; Retrieved February 3, 2017 .
  3. ^ Eugen Weber: Action Française Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France . Stanford University Press, 1962, ISBN 978-0-8047-0134-1 , pp. 452 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  4. ↑ HENRI BERAUD ET GEORGES CLAUDE en liberté conditionnelle. Le Monde, January 3, 1950, accessed June 16, 2018 (French).
  5. ↑ wdr.de: deadline - May 23, 1960: death of neon tube inventor Georges Claude - deadline - WDR , accessed on March 15, 2017
  6. ↑ Kenneth E. Hendrickson III: The Encyclopedia of the Industrial Revolution in World History . Rowman & Littlefield, 2014, ISBN 978-0-8108-8888-3 , pp. 187 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
personal data
SURNAME Claude, Georges
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French physicist and inventor of the neon tube
DATE OF BIRTH September 24, 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH May 23, 1960
Place of death Saint-Cloud