[4] After completing his engineering studies, he directed the construction of the railway line from Madrid to Irun in Spain.

[3] Ravel drove his steam-driven automobile for short trips in the industrial areas around Paris just before the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

[5] During the war, the shed where the machine was stored was buried under the fortifications built for the defence of Paris, and Ravel was ruined.

[4] Their first son, Joseph-Maurice Ravel, was born on 7 March 1875 in the village of Ciboure in Basque country just north of the Spanish border.

The show was taken to the US and presented by the Barnum and Bailey circus until the car missed its soft landing and crashed, killing the driver.

Sometime after the Ravels invented a circular water track with an artificial current, the ancestor of the modern jacuzzi, which let a swimmer train without needing an Olympic-size pool.

[7] Ravel suffered from a brain hemorrhage, and in August 1906 went with his son Maurice to recover in Hermance, at the end of Lake Geneva.