Jean-Baptiste de La Chapelle

Jean-Baptiste de La Chapelle was a French priest, mathematician and inventor, born about 1710 and dead in Paris in 1792. He contributed 270 articles to the Encyclopedie on the subjects of arithmetic and geometry. In June 1747 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 1775 he invented a primitive diving suit which he called a scaphandre, from the Greek words skaphe, boat, and andros, man, in his book Traite de la construction theorique et pratique du scaphandre ou du bateau de l homme. The invention of the Abbe de la Chapelle consisted of a suit made of cork which allowed soldiers to float and swim in water; as the name and description suggest, it was more of a flotation suit than a diving suit. His publications include a discourse on the study of mathematics, published in Paris in 1743, and an institutions of geometry.