It was the debut of the picture interview. On the eve of his one hundredth and first birthday in 1886, Marie-Eugene Chevreuil, scientist and director of the Gobelin tapestry works, called at the Paris studio of the photographer G.F. Tournachon. A man of ingenuity, Tournachon- better known as the famed “Nadar” – had hit upon a new journalistic idea: the picture interview.
"Inventors are always inclined to confound invention with imagination, which is not all the same thing...The inventors of balloons swear to be able to steer them. Let them pick me up at my window and deliver me to the institute. That way I'll avoid having to descend my staircase."
Chevreuil, an ideal subject, delivered a barrage of controversial opinions on science, evolution, his prescription for a long life- no alcohol- “I am president of the Anjou Society of Wines- but only its honorary president.” He was also director of the Gobelins tapestry works, where, as a chemist, he was expected to improve the dyes used to colour the fabrics. He discovered that the intensity of colours as they appear to the eye depend largely on their neighbouring colours, and he designed a wheel of 72 colours scientifically arranged, which could be used by designers and painters. The Pointilliste painters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac both used his writings.
"You know, I don't condemn what I can't explain, but I will say that I must see. One is al ittle tempted to lend an ear to inventors, since it is well known that their kind of mind is easily given to illusions. And what is even more important, their conversation is so boring...."
ADDENDUM:
Chevreul’s long life spanned a century of remarkable progress in chemistry. Born three years before Lavoisier published his Traité, giving the coup de grâce to phlogiston, he lived to see such major advances as the presentation of Dalton’s atomic theory; Kekulé’s structure theory; Cannizzaro’s perception that Avogadro’s Hypothesis gave a logical basis for the determination of atomic weights; and Mendeléeff’s marshalling of the elements in his Periodic Table. ( William A. Smeaton )
Nadar by Nadar. 1858.
Chevreul also took part in many of the philosophical debates of the 19th Century. He strongly opposed skepticism and materialism and was appointed by the Academie des Sciences to investigate several psychic phenomena including divining rods and pendulums. He performed experimental studies on the pendulum’s astonishing properties in 1812 and published his results in 1833 as an open letter to the famous physicist André M Ampère. In 1854 he published a book “Of the Divining Rod, the “Explorer’ Pendulum and Turning Tables, From the Point of View of History, Critique, and the Experimental Method, Mallet-Bachelier, Paris”.
"As for Mr. Charles Darwin, remember that a single error sows the seed of errors! Me, the son of an orangutan....Never!
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