2025French Inventions - Stamp Booklet

On June 16, 2025, La Poste is issuing a collector's booklet of eight postage stamps on the theme of French inventions.

This booklet illustrates the theme of French inventions with eight inventions from among the hundreds listed in France. Whether they were precursors, pioneers, or patented inventors, these French geniuses made it possible for everyone today to have access to technologies or objects whose use has become commonplace:

The calculator: the Pascaline, by the famous polymath Blaise Pascal (1623-1662).

The hot air balloon: an invention of the two brothers, Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (1740-1810) and Jacques Etienne Montgolfier (1745-1799).

The folding umbrella: by Jean Marius, inventor of a "broken parasol-umbrella to be carried in one's pocket," protected by a patent signed by Louis XIV. The Sewing Machine: by Barthélémy Thimonnier (1793-1857).

Cinema: The animated film industry owes much to Etienne Jules Marey (1830-1904), a physician and physiologist. Working on the locomotion of humans and animals, he took rapid-fire snapshots on a single gelatin-bromide-coated glass plate using his camera gun, creating chronophotography.

Since 1995, the Cinémathèque Française has digitized and restored over 400 fragile cellulose nitrate films of Étienne-Jules Marey's works.

Radio: The principle of electrical transmission between two distant points was invented by physicist Édouard Branly (1844-1940). The soundtrack: Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (1817-1879), a typographer, invented a system that allowed acoustic vibrations to be engraved on lampblack-coated paper—in other words, the graphic trace of a sound. Forgotten in favor of Edison, this pioneer's voice was finally heard in 2008 (singing "Au clair de la lune") thanks to researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the U.S.A. His voice can be heard at http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune.mp3

The digital code: we owe it to Robert Carrière (1931-2007), an electronics engineer, inspired by a Popeye cartoon.