His grandfather, Bar Koschel, had applied for French citizenship in Seppois-le-Bas in 1808, took the name Bernhard Weiller, settled in Sélestat and became a "Judaic teacher".

He was not able to enter the École Polytechnique due to health problems, and instead went to Trinity College, Oxford, in England to improve his English and study Greek, physics and chemistry.

[5][a] Weiller visited the United States in 1901 and was very impressed by the booming economy and the metallurgical, electrical and mechanical industries.

It is, in fact, very probable that if Negroes came into our domestic lives and caused the same problems there as they do in the United States, they would arouse in us the same repugnance and be martyrized in our popular press and our vaudeville shows.

He observed that the working men of the USA had "a fine sense of their own worth, so that they did not suffer the bitterness and the meanness of class envy, an inestimable boon".

They did not, as in Europe, form great radical political parties with the aim of overthrowing the existing order, but instead devoted all their effort to rising to a higher social level.

Emmanuel Chadeau sees Weiller as a good entrepreneur who did not have the managerial skills needed to operate the firms he founded.

[3] Weiller said he was inspired by the experiments by Jules Antoine Lissajous, who had used light reflected from small mirrors to investigate vibratory motion.

His proposal was to use a rotating drum to which a number of tangential mirrors were attached, oriented so the image was scanned into a series of lines projected onto a selenium cell.

[12] Jules Verne wrote a short story for the New York Forum about a phonotelephotograph machine based on Weiller's invention, which he imagined to have finally become a reality in 2889 AD.

The French researcher Marcel Brillouin wrote in the Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées (Paris, 30 January 1891) that "M Weiller's 360-mirror cylinder ... is almost impossible to construct if you want fidelity."

[17] Later the concept was used by television pioneers in the US, UK and Germany such as Boris Rosing, Ernst Alexanderson, John Logie Baird and August Karolus(de) and was commercially available by 1932.

[21] He developed a bronze alloy that combined the conductivity of copper with the strength to remain stretched between poles 50 metres (160 ft) apart, of great value to telegraph and telephone companies, and obtained several patents in France and other countries.

[21] In 1898 the Le Havre factory included forges, foundries, rolling mills and wireworks and processed copper, steel, aluminum, brass, bronze and nickel.

Weiller became associated with Swiss banks, and from 1907 started to acquire facilities and companies to build a huge industrial complex.

[3] They did not build the machines, but contracted with the airship firm Société Astra and the Ateliers et Chantiers de France of Dunkirk for the airframes and with Bariquand et Marre(fr) for the engines.

[3] In September 1912 Weiller created the Compagnie universelle de télégraphie et téléphonie sans fil (CUTT: Universal Wireless Telegraphy Company).

He was president, and participants included the German firm C. Lorenz AG, French banks and investors, and the American banker J. P. Morgan.

The CUTT was forced out of business due to nationalist outrage at a French telegraphy service depending on an alliance between a Jew and a German.

[4] Weiller ran for election to the Chamber of Deputies in 1888 as a republican candidate for Angoulême during the Boulangism crisis, but was defeated.

In 1914 at the request of the government Weiller visited Switzerland and wrote a report on German propaganda abroad and the shortage of raw materials in Germany.

[4] In 1917 Weiller submitted a project for the people of Alsace-Lorraine to adopt French versions of their [German] names to "protect them from public malignity and the reprisals of the mob".

[34] On 23 March 1920 Le Figaro published an article by Weiller in which he argued that France could have achieved a favorable end to the war in 1917 if she had had a representative in the Vatican during peace negotiations at that time.