The Argand lamp is a home lighting oil lamp producing a light output of 6 to 10 candlepower which was invented and patented in 1780 by Aimé Argand. Aside from the improvement in brightness, the more complete combustion of the wick and oil required much less frequent snuffing (trimming) of the wick.

In France, they are known as "Quinquets" after Antoine-Arnoult Quinquet, a pharmacist in Paris, who used the idea originated by Argand and popularized it in France. He is sometimes credited with the addition of the glass chimney to the lamp.

The Argand lamp had a cylindrical candle wick mounted so that air can pass both through the center of the wick and also around the outside of the wick before being drawn into cylindrical chimney which steadies the flame and improves the flow of air. Early models used ground glass which was sometimes tinted around the wick.

An Argand lamp used whale oil, colza, olive oil or other vegetable oil as fuel which was supplied by a gravity feed from a reservoir mounted above the burner.

Louis Aragon (French pronunciation: [lwi aʁaˈɡɔ̃], born Louis Andrieux (October 3, 1897 – December 24, 1982), was a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.

Aragon was born and died in Paris. He was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother, believing them to be his sister and foster mother, respectively. His biological father, Louis Andrieux, a former senator for Forcalquier, was married and thirty years older than Aragon's mother, whom he seduced when she was seventeen. Aragon's mother passed Andrieux off to her son as his godfather. Aragon was only told the truth at the age of 19, as he was leaving to serve in the First World War, from which neither he nor his parents believed he would return. Andrieux's refusal or inability to recognize his son would influence Aragon's poetry later on.

Having been involved in Dadaism from 1919 to 1924, he became a founding member of Surrealism in 1924, with André Breton and Philippe Soupault under the pen-name "Aragon". In the 1920s, Aragon became a fellow traveller of the French Communist Party (PCF) along with several other surrealists, and joined the Party in January 1927. In 1933 he began to write for the party's newspaper, L'Humanité, in the "news in brief" section. He would remain a member for the rest of his life, writing several political poems including one to Maurice Thorez, the general secretary of the PCF. During the World Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture (1935), Aragon opposed his former friend André Breton, who wanted to use the opportunity as a tribune to defend the writer Victor Serge, associated with Leon Trotsky's Left Opposition.

Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ bɛʁnaʁ leɔ̃ fuko]) (18 September 1819 – 11 February 1868) was a French physicist best known for the invention of the Foucault pendulum, a device demonstrating the effect of the Earth's rotation. He also made an early measurement of the speed of light, discovered eddy currents, and although he didn't invent it, is credited with naming the gyroscope.

Foucault was the son of a publisher in Paris, where he was born on September 18, 1819. After an education received chiefly at home, he studied medicine, which he abandoned in favour of physics due to a fear of blood. He first directed his attention to the improvement of L. J. M. Daguerre's photographic processes. For three years he was experimental assistant to Alfred Donné (1801–1878) in his course of lectures on microscopic anatomy.

With A. H. L. Fizeau he carried out a series of investigations on the intensity of the light of the sun, as compared with that of carbon in the arc lamp, and of lime in the flame of the oxyhydrogen blowpipe; on the interference of infrared radiation, and of light rays differing greatly in lengths of path; and on the chromatic polarization of light.