Our card today was supplied by a reader after I spoke of several reasons why glasses were called lunettes. However this card gives that word another facet as it shows Zacharias Jansen (or Zacharias Janssen), and he is described as being a "Lunetier". Now that word is still in existence in France and it means someone who makes and/or retails glasses, but at one time, as shown on this card, it meant something else. You see Zacharias Jansen is often claimed to be the inventor of both the first optical telescope and the first compound microscope, and what both these things have in common is that they use lenses. And from that it becomes clear that by calling eye glasses "lunettes" they were not referring to the glasses or the frame at all, simply to the lenses that the frame held in place.
It seems our man did also make eyeglasses, but only from 1616, the year after he was chosen to become the guardian of two children belonging to a man called Lowys Lowyssen, who must have died, because along with the children came a great deal of his effects, amongst which were tools that made the frames for spectacles. Now as our man knew all about lenses, it was not long before he had set himself up as a spectacle maker. However he seems to have got himself in all kinds of trouble after that, and died some time in the 1630s.
As far as Chocolat Lombart, that claims to have been founded in 1760, making it probably the first in France. However it was founded under a different name, for the trader himself, Antoine Meunier. His shop was in the centre of Paris and soon gained a reputation amongst the rich and famous, including royalty, who plied him with warrants. He sold chocolates, but also sweets and tea, which, oddly, considering how the story continues, was branded as "Lombart Tea". Then we lose track of them, for a hundred years, when they opened a huge factory on Avenue de Choisy.
In 1875 the company was bought out, by a man called Jules Lombart. Now I don`t know if this was a coincidence or he was related to the tea. He did not know much about chocolate, he had workers to know that, but he was a whizz at promotion, and attended almost every trade fair he could get to, and won lots of gold medals. He also realised that to be a successful seller you could not cater for the rich alone, you had to bring chocolate to everyone. That led to small bars of chocolate, right down to their popularly priced "One Penny Bar", and to novelties like chocolate cigarettes.
Jules Lombart, above all else, loved art and architecture, and he spent his money on not only a vast collection for himself, but in beautifying and up-keeping local buildings, including the Church of Sainte-Anne in the Butte-aux-Cailles. When he died, his collections were left to the town of Doullens, plus money to build a museum in a disused convent to hold them. Sadly this museum was badly bombed in the Second World War and many of its items stolen, but the building was restored in the 1950s.
In 1957, the Chocolat Lombart company was bought out, by Chocolat Menier
I`m not sure how many are in this set, it is suspected to be 25, hence the list below has numbers, to see when we get them all. So far we know of
- Ader - flying
- Bessemer - steel
- Branly - transatlantic telegraphy
- Edison - phonograph, electric light, etc
- Benjamin Franklin - lightning rod
- Robert Fulton - steamboat
- Gutenberg - printing
- Jacquard - silk weaving
- Jansen - optics
- Montgolfier - hot air balloon
- Isaac Newton - gravity
- Nobel - dynamite
- Bernard Palissy - ceramics
- Renaudot - newspapers
- Berthold Schwartz - gunpowder
- Senefelder - printing
- George Stephenson - locomotion
- Toricelli - physics
- Triptoleme - the plough
- Tubalcain - fire
- Watt - steam engine