The system was invented by a French engineer called Claude Chappe, who thoughtfully designed relay stations consisting of two buildings – one for the sending of messages, the other as a dining room for the messengers. Beautifully French.
The idea was simple and yet doomed to obsolescence in a combination that only the French seem to manage. At first, the Chappe telegraph spread outwards from France, with lines even extending as far as Amsterdam and Milan. Then in 1836 a Brit called Charles Wheatstone invented the gloriously simple wire telegraph that was adapted and adopted all over the world, and the French Chappe telegraph was dead. As was poor old Chappe – he killed himself in 1805.
Yes, the French have a perverse gift for inventing things that no other country wants to use, and then brooding about it.
The prime example is the Minitel.
Launched in 1983, it was a forerunner of the Internet. It was a lot like Teletext or Ceefax, except that it was more interactive, and instead of being accessed via a television screen that most households already had, the French complicated things by forcing Minitel users to rent a small dedicated screen.
The Minitel was as slow as all computers were in the eighties, but earned a fortune for France Telecom and the French advertising industry when its sex chat sites caught on. Every billboard, TV channel and magazine in France was suddenly decorated with pouting topless models and Minitel server addresses like 3615 SEXY. Millions of French people spent their nights typing capital-lettered messages on to little fold-down keyboards attached to their cranky beige boxes, and then waiting minutes for the black-and-white screens to refresh themselves and the answers to come back. France, the country that loves conversation more than anything, conceived the online chat room fifteen years before its time.
But then an Englishman called Timothy Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web to make the American Internet work anywhere, and killed the Minitel. The streets of France were littered with miniature beige screens, and once again those scheming Anglo-Saxons had inflicted a non-French idea upon the world.
Some other examples of this universally unwanted French inventiveness are:
• Pétanque, the only sport designed to be played in a dogs’ toilet.
• The Citroën DS – shaped like a flattened frog, it is the only road vehicle in the world guaranteed to give all passengers instant carsickness.
• The gear lever on a Renault 4L – perfectly capable of changing gear, but only when it felt like it.
• The primitive soap dispensers that used to be fitted in French café toilets. An oval cake of soap was loaded on to a curved metal bar screwed to the wall above the sink. In theory this was a good idea, as it saved the soap from falling on the floor or melting away in the sink. In practice it was disgusting, because the (usually bright-yellow) cake of soap mostly served as an exhibition space for the yuk that the previous occupant of the toilet had smeared on it. The world was very lucky that the liquid-soap dispenser 4 was invented and killed off the French prototype.
Of course, the French have many reasons to be proud of their creativity, because they have contributed some great inventions to the world – the bikini, scuba diving, Braille, pasteurization, the hot-air balloon (pretty apt, you could say), batteries, the parachute and photography, to name just a few.
And some of their versions of existing technology have become global success stories. Few Americans realize, for instance, that when they take the high-speed train from New York to Boston, they are getting on what is 5 basically a cleverly camouflaged French TGV.
France also conceived some typically French, and very successful, variations on an existing theme:
• The château, a building that pretends to have a military function but is in fact merely decorative. A lot like the French army in 1940.
• The Foreign Legion, a group of expendable ex-cons and unemployables who can be safely sent into danger zones to do the dirty work. If they don’t come back, no influential person is going to kick up a fuss about a lost son.
• Not forgetting the camping municipal, that ridiculously cheap (or occasionally free) campsite in countless villages all over France that encourages the passing traveller to stay the night and spend some money in the local café. French hospitality at its best.
But top of this list of inventions that France is right to be proud of has to be a certain edible delicacy.
The farmer who conceived foie gras must have been a very inventive Monsieur indeed. You can imagine him explaining his new pâté to his friends:
‘Oh, you don’t just mince up offcuts of meat like you do with other pâtés. You take a goose or a duck, stick a funnel down its throat, and pour as much dried maize as you can into its gullet every day until it is so obese it can hardly walk. Then you rip out its grossly deformed liver and spread it on toast.’
‘You’ve been at the absinthe again, Jean-Pierre,’ his friends must have said. ‘Come and get some fresh air over at the dogs’ toilet.’
But old Jean-Pierre was right, and foie gras could only have been a French invention. If it had been an Anglo-Saxon idea and called ‘fat liver’, no one would have bought it.
Am I Right or Am I Right?
The Frenchman’s favourite tool when showing how right he is is the rhetorical question. Why is it his favourite tool? Because it
