FAVÉ

FRANCE (see also List of Individuals)

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18.7.1853 Paris/F - 30.7.1922 Paris/F

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Louis Favé graduated from Ecole Polytechnique and continued in the corps of the hydrographical engineers. In 1876 he participated at a first training with a navigation boat after having completed Ecole Navale. In 1881, after having received basic training, he was sent to the French possession of Indochina, to establish the coastal waters around the city of Hanoi. His works and his successes were similar to those of Joseph Renaud (1854-1921), one of his former class mates. In 1887 Favé stayed for two years in the new French possession Madagascar where he had to map all the North portion of the large island in the Indian Ocean. These works were important to all French works relating to such a possession. After having spent 12 years on the sea, Favé was called back to his country to take over other positions, and leave his former duties to younger colleagues. In the campaign of 1895 and 1896 he thus had to revise sea maps of the French southern coast, from the Spanish border to the gulf of Hyères close to Toulon. This became the final contribution of Favé to the geography of the Mediterranean. From then, he was interested in the prediction of tides and the currents of the sea, and thus turned more to problems in hydrodynamics.

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During the second part of his career, Favé thus was interested in two main questions: How can any point on Earth be determined either from the air or from the sea, and How can tides be recorded? Let us further consider the latter question. Up until about 1900, tides were mainly observed from the coasts and observations were thus often influenced by coastal disturbances. Favé initiated the systematic observation of tides from high-sea conditions and thus improved earlier statements. He lanced a so-called marégrapheplongeur around 1890 which was used for decades in France. He was elected Member of Académie des Sciences in 1918; one year later he was promoted to Commander of Légion d'Honneur. He was from then also a Member of Bureau des Longitudes.

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_{Favé, L. (1890). Rapport sur la mission hydrographique de Madagascar, en 1887-1888. Annales hydrographiques 42: 1-59.}

_{Favé, L. (1910). Marégraphe plongeur, appareil enregistrant les marées sur les côtes et au large. Annales hydrographiques Série 2 30: 393-415; Série 3 4: 193-237.}

_{Favé, L. (1910). Instructions nautiques. Côtes sud de la France et côtes de Corse. Imprimerie Nationale: Paris.}

_{Fichot, E. (1924). Louis-Eugène-Napoléon Favé. Annuaire Bureau des Longitudes: E1-E26. P}

_{St. Le Tourneur, B.F. (1971). Favé. Dictionnaire biographique française 13: 833. Letouzey: Paris.}