Charles Cros
1842-1888
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(Émile-Hortensius-) Charles Cros was a French inventor and poet whose work in several fields foreshadowed or paralleled important developments. He was interested in mechanical and physical sciences. He designed an automatic telegraph and showed it at the World Fair of 1867. He sent to the Société française de photographie, in 1869, a system for reproduction of color images. Also, he delivered viable plans on 18 April 1877 to the Académie des Sciences, for an apparatus called a paléophone, which was the principle of the gramophone. Thus, he had the idea before Edison.
In 1869 he published an opuscule entitled “A Study of the Means of Communicating With Other Planets.” It was published as a little brochure and the author sent copies to the Academy of Sciences and the newspapers. Nobody took it seriously at the time, perhaps because Cros already had a reputation as a jokester and cabaret comic. As an indication, when Arthur Rimbaud first came to Paris, bent on assaulting respectability, he stayed with the Cros brothers.
Charles was the author of famous cabaret monologues, the founder of the drinking club Les Hydropathes, and early science-fiction writer. He also tried to reproduce the functions of the brain with clockwork, while teaching in a school for deaf-mutes and preparing to die of alcohol poisoning at age 45. He died in poverty and was never recognized for his discoveries in his lifetime, due to more influential and better funded competitors.
Read and listen to one of his poems for children here.