Théodore Sivel

Théodore Henri Sivel (10 November 1834 – 15 April 1875) was a French naval officer and aeronaut.

Biography The son of Alexandre Sivel and Caroline Brès—a Protestant family—Théodore Henri Sivel was born in the family home at Pignet, one kilometer southeast of Sauve.

At the age of 14, he set sail for distant seas and spent nearly twenty years at sea, circumnavigating the globe several times. He became a master mariner. He was a member of the French delegation that attended the coronation of Radama II, King of Madagascar.

On March 23 and 24, 1875, under the leadership of Paul Bert, he participated as captain in the Zénith 's record-breaking endurance flight (22 hours 40 minutes) from Paris to Arcachon. their ignorance regarding the physiological effects of altitudes exceeding 8,000 meters, and the Zénith 's excessively rapid rate of ascent. Tissandier himself recounted his and his friends' ordeal in the publications La Nature and L'Aéronaute. Maurice Dreyfous—who had been Tissandier’s publisher—wrote in a book of memoirs details about the Zénith disaster that Tissandier had previously withheld from the public. It emerged that it was Sivel, not Crocé-Spinelli, who was responsible for the balloon's sudden and fatal rise. Sivel, who was tasked with constantly monitoring the balloon's altitude via the barometer, was reportedly misled by his nearsightedness; he believed the reading at the aerostat indicated the balloon was about to touch the ground, and consequently threw everything within reach overboard.

At the time of his death, Sivel left behind Marie, an orphaned six-year-old girl.

Homages

A street in the 14th arrondissement of Paris was named Rue Sivel in 1896. A memorial to the accident, designed by architect Albert Tissandier (brother of Gaston Tissandier), takes the form of a stone obelisk surrounded by a railing on Rue de l'Église Saint-Georges in Ciron. The town hall square in his native village bears his name; a plaque has been placed on the house where he was born. In 1975, a balloon was launched from the Sauve stadium to celebrate the centenary of the aeronaut's death.