Philippe Lebon

Philippe Lebon was a French engineer, born May 29, 1767 in Brachay, France and died December 1, 1804 in Paris, credited as a founding figure of the gas lighting and gas engine industries decades before either became commercially established. Trained as a mining engineer, he patented an apparatus he called the Thermolampe in 1799, distilling wood in a sealed retort to produce a combustible gas that could be piped for lighting and heating, industrializing a method of extracting lighting gas from wood at a time when gas lighting was still a scientific curiosity. In 1801 he patented a further design for an engine fueled by gas and ignited by an electric spark, one of the earliest documented internal combustion engine concepts, improving on an existing design by another inventor. Lebon struggled to secure investment for his ideas and died of illness in 1804, a death popular legend later mischaracterized as an assassination; his wife, Cornelie de Brambilla, whom he had married in 1792, spent years afterward pressing his financial and priority claims for the inventions.