March 09, 2019
In 1732, an engineer named Henri Pitot got the job of measuring the flow of the Seine, the famous river that bisects the city of Paris. A late bloomer, Pitot seems to have been an unremarkable student until age 19, when he fell in love with geometry after picking up a book on the subject in a shop. Pitot went on to accomplish many feats of engineering in his career, but it's the contraption he devised to measure the speed of water flow that has made his name famous among boaters.
