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Georges Claude (24 September 187023 May 1960) was a French engineer and inventor. He is noted for his early work on the industrial liquefaction of air, for the invention and commercialization of neon lighting, and for a large experiment on generating energy by pumping cold seawater up from the depths. He has been considered by some to be "the Thomas Edison of France". The Claude process for manufacturing ammonia was named for him.
Claude was an active collaborator with the German occupiers of France during the Second World War, for which he was imprisoned in 1945 and stripped of his honors.
Georges Claude studied at the École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris (ESPCI). He then held several positions. He was an electrical inspector in a cable factory and the laboratory manager in an electric works. He founded and edited a magazine, L'Étincelle Électrique ( The Electric Spark); his important friendship with Jacques-Arsène d'Arsonval apparently dates from this time. About 1896, Claude learned of the explosion risk for bottled acetylene, which was used at the time for lighting. Acetylene is explosive when stored under pressure. Claude showed that acetylene dissolved well in acetone, equivalent to storing it under 25 atmospheres of pressure, reduced the risk in handling the gas.
The terms "neon light" and "neon sign" are now often applied to electrical lighting incorporating sealed glass tubes filled with argon, mercury vapor, or other gases, in addition to neon. In 1915 a U.S. patent was issued to Claude covering the design of the electrodes for neon lights; See reproduction of patent. this patent became the strongest basis for the monopoly held in the U.S. by his company, Claude Neon Lights, through the early 1930s. Paid access.
Georges Claude and the French company he founded have long been said to have introduced neon signs to the United States by selling two to Earle C. Anthony, the owner of Packard car dealerships in San Francisco and Los Angeles (in 1923) but no conclusive evidence of this has ever been uncovered. Instead, photographs from 1923 to 1925 reveal a neon sign in Los Angeles, but not until 1925. A photograph of Anthony's San Francisco dealership may show a neon Packard sign in 1924 but is not conclusive. However, by 1924 Claude's company (Claude Neon) had opened subsidiaries or licensed patents to affiliated companies across the U.S. (such as Electrical Products Corporation, on the U.S. West Coast) and, though neon signage caught on only slowly, by the 1930s it was common across the U.S., eventually becoming, for a few decades, the country's dominant form of lit signage.
In 1935, Claude constructed another plant, this time aboard a 10,000-ton cargo vessel moored off the coast of Brazil. Weather and waves destroyed both plants before they could become net power generators. (Net power is the amount of power generated after subtracting power needed to run the system.)
Following the Allied liberation of France in 1944, Claude was taken into custody on 2 December 1944 because of his collaboration with the Axis powers. He was removed from the French Academy of Sciences. In 1945 he was tried and convicted of propaganda work favoring collaboration, but was cleared of another charge that he helped design the V-1 flying bomb. He was condemned to life imprisonment, and was imprisoned. In 1950 he was released from prison, with acknowledgment of his research on ocean thermal energy conversion.
Wartime collaboration and post-war imprisonment
Even as a young engineer, Claude was unsympathetic to democratic rule. In 1933 he joined the Action Française, which favored restoration of a monarchy in France. He was a close friend of the monarchist leader Charles Maurras. Following the 1940 defeat of France by Germany at the beginning of the Second World War, the subsequent German occupation of northern France and establishment of the Vichy France in the south, Claude publicly supported French collaboration with Germany. Among his other activities, he published several tracts supporting collaboration. He was a member of a Distinguished Committee of the Groupe Collaboration, which had been founded in September 1940. He was nominated by the Vichy regime as a member of the Conseil National Consultatif in 1941.
Selected bibliography
Claude wrote several semi-popular descriptions of his research, in addition to his wartime tracts and a memoir.
Further reading
Categories: 1870 Births, 1960 Deaths, Scientists From Paris, Groupe Collaboration Members, Members Of The National Council Of Vichy France, 20th-century French Engineers, 20th-century French Chemists, 20th-century French Inventors, Neon Lighting, Air Liquide People, French Anti-communists, Espci Paris Alumni, Members Of The French Academy Of Sciences, Legion Of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism, People Convicted Of Indignité Nationale, French Prisoners Sentenced To Life Imprisonment, Prisoners Sentenced To Life Imprisonment By France
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