Jean-Marie-Joseph Coutelle

Jean-Marie-Joseph Coutelle (3 January 1748, in Le Mans – 20 March 1835, in Paris) was a French engineer, scientist and pioneer of ballooning.

On 2 April 1794 the National Convention made Coutelle a captain and first officer of the Company of Aeronauts and ordered him to build balloons to aid the French Revolutionary armies.

In November 1800 Coutelle and the mining engineer Rozière were authorised to accompany the great caravan of Tor, which was heading to Sinai with 1,800 camels.

A member of the Costaz commission, he began to admire the two obelisks at Luxor and suggested to the Institut d'Égypte a new way of transporting one of them to France - 30 years later, a similar method to his suggestion was used to transport one to the Place de la Concorde in Paris, where it now stands.

He died in 1835 and was buried in the 11th division of the cimetière du Père-Lachaise - his tomb was restored in 2004 by the "Souvenir français".