No electric doorbells here

... even though is the door to the André-Marie Ampère museum near Lyon. We visited en route to Reims. Saw lots of old equipment used by Ampère whose name would eventually provide that of the unit that quantifies electrical current: the amp. He was educated by his father, a wealthy silk merchant and magistrate in Lyon. Sadly, his father was to become a victim of the revolution. The night before he was guillotined he wrote to his wife that there was nothing he wouldn't expect of their son. A-M Ampère was clearly a genius, writing scientific papers by the age of 13 and presenting them in 1788 to the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Lyon.

But it's the building's door-knocker that I've chosen to blip! And I had to add an extra of these drawings. They depict a lady, from whose bonnet trails a lightning conductor; the same from a gentleman's umbrella. At first, I wondered if they were satirical cartoons of the era, but no, they were serious inventions by Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg who, among many other things, translated Benjamin Franklin's scientific papers into French.