In Paris last week a trembling, white-haired old man stood before the bar of justice. Georges Claude, 74, world-famed inventor, has sometimes been called the ''Edison of France." He invented neon lights, was a pioneer in the liquefaction of rare gases, the extraction of atmospheric nitrogen, the synthesis of ammonia. The charge against him : collaboration with the Germans.
During the Nazi occupation, Claude traveled around France, lecturing, at his own expense, on the benefits of National Socialism. He demanded that Vichy take stronger measures against resisters. The testimony showed that he had become embittered against the-prewar French Gov ernment because it preferred the German nitrogen process to his own, that he was a close friend of Royalist Leader Charles Maurras. After the Allied landing in North Africa, he tried to commit suicide by swallowing a heavy dose of strychnine.
Benthocometes-Claude. Georges Claude had made a fortune from his prac tical inventions, spent much of it on bizarre experiments. Fifteen years ago he took a ship to Cuba's Matanzas Bay, sank a mile-long tube, pumped up cold water from the ocean floor. It was his idea to utilize the temperature differential be tween this cold water and warm surface water to power a turbine. One day his apparatus generated enough power to light 40 500-candlepower bulbs — about 30 horse power (TIME, Oct. 20, 1930). When an unknown species of fish was sucked into the tube and retrieved at the surface, the Havana Academy of Science named it for him: Benthocometes-Claude.
Even in prison science consoled him.
From his cell, he tried to patent a method of catching fish by sucking them through seawater pumps directly into a ship, where they would be refrigerated by liquid air. His lawyer often found him standing before a window, holding up to the sun light a bowl of water containing a number of complicated thermometers. He would not say what these experiments were for.
One witness said: "Claude's mentality is that of the inventor, which is closely akin to a paranoiac mentality as shown by errors of judgment, exaltation of one's personality, pride and vanity and social inadaptability."
Almost stone-deaf, M. Claude wore in court a cumbersome hearing device of his .own invention It did not work very well. When the jury returned a verdict, he said: "Eh?" The presiding judge shouted louder. Still the old man did not hear. Finally his counsel put his lips to Claude's ear, bawled: "Life imprisonment!" The old man nodded. Wagging his head mournfully, he was led away.