Inventions That Change The World

Larrey introduces the medical-car vehicle. Ambulance first began to appear on the Napoleonic battlefields of France in 1792. Their inventor, surgeon Dominique-Jean Larrey (1766-1842), had grown frustrated with regulations requiring him to stay to the rear. After observing how the mobility of the French artillery helped it to quickly disengage from an advancing enemy, Larrey proposed to the military hierarchy what he called ambulance val-ante, or "flying ambulance", that would follow the artillery into battle and tend to the wounded where they fell.      Larrey devised a horse-drawn wheeled carriage with a central compartment able to transport two patients comfortably on leather-covered horsehair mattresses; windows on either side provided good ventilation. Inside, patients could be moved in and out easily on floors set on rollers. Recessed areas contained medicines and medical equipment, and ramps at the rear doubled as emergency operating tables. “Before… the fl

The French initiate metric measurement in 1791. In the nineteenth century there was a confusing multiplicity of units of measurement. In England, for example, length was measured in inches, feet, yards, furlongs, rods, chains, poles, perches, miles, and more.      In 1791 the French National Assembly instructed the Academy of Sciences to design a simple decimal system. In 1973 the unit of length, the meter, was chosen to be one ten-millionth of the distance between the north pole of Earth and the equator, the specific meridian that chosen being the one that passes though Paris. Unfortunately, the length of the meridian had not been measured at the time nd this job was carried out by Jean- Baptiste-Joseph Delabmbre (1749-1822) and Pierre Mèchain (1744-1804).      A platinum bar engraved with two marks separated by the new "meter" was then placed in the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris. Decimal divisions,such as the centimeter and kilometer were then