Obit of the Day

Obit of the Day: Inventor of the Smart Card

The first attempt at making financial data compact and easily accessible, was a signet ring created by Roland Moreno. The ring would be inserted into a designated spot and a transaction between the retailers and the customer’s bank would be completed. But Moreno realized that the ring wasn’t the best idea, so he put the chip onto a card. That was in 1975.

By 1983, Moreno’s smart card was chosen by France Telecom for new phone cards. Less than a decade later French debit cards were converted from magnetic strips to Moreno’s chip-laden format. (Smart cards are considered more secure than magnetic strip cards, and also hold larger amounts of data - but may lead to a greater lack of privacy since the chips are more easily trackable.)

Although smart cards are now nearly ubiquitous (although less in the U.S. than much of Europe) Moreno was rarely given recognition for his invention and it’s impact, beyond the borders of France. He was named an Officer of the Legion d’Honneur in 2009.

Roland Moreno died at the age of 66.

(Mr. Moreno with his smart cards, and his Macintosh, is copyright Jean-Claude Coutausse/AFP and courtesy of The Guardian.)

Obit of the Day: Scranton’s Silent Star

When Polly Alpert died in Scranton, Pennsylvania at the age of 103 she had lived in the city for 57 years, raising her four children and doing all the things that post-World War II American moms did. But there’s a good chance that not a lot of her Scranton peers were European film stars of the silent era.

Pola Illéry was born in Romania in 1908. By 1928 she had moved to France and became a star in their film industry. In ten years she performed in fifteen films, often as the star. She fled France in 1939 with the coming of the Nazi threat - Illéry was Jewish. She and her husband found their to the U.S. and Illéry became a naturalized citizen in 1946. They settled down in Scranton in 1954 and Illéry moved on with her life.

You can find Illéry’s full filmography here.

(The image of Illéry is from Sous les Toits de Paris or Under the Roofs of Paris and is courtesy of www.cinema.de)

Obit of the Day: La Légende du Design Industriel

Roger Tallon was a master of industrial design. An engineer with a talent for art, Tallon spent his career “dedicated to the improvement of objects for the greater good of society.” During his career he worked to design visually pleasing, but pratical, objects for companies such as General Electric, Frigidaire, and LIP watchmakers, above. A winner of France’s highest honor for design in 1985, Tallon was also given the opportunity to design the country’s high-speed rail, TGV.

Hearkening back to architectural giants like Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, Tallon designed every detail of the train from the reading lights in first class, to the headrests and upholstery on the seats, and the body of the train itself. (Above you can see the engineer’s compartment and the seats.)

Tallon’s work was recognized by the art world as well. His 1963 design of a Téléavia television set, above, and his modular spiral staircase (below) are part of the Museum of Modern Art’s collection.

Tallon died at the age of 82.

Random note: Tallon’s career choice led to some friction with his parents as a young adult, but not how you might imagine. As a child he showed talent as an artist, and his parents wanted him to go to art school. Instead, against his parents’ wishes, he decided to study Engineering. It’s like some sort of bizzaro parent-child discussion.

(Image courtesy of frogsmoke.com)

Obit of the Day: “The White Mouse”

Nancy Wake came a long way, literally and figuratively, from her birth in a New Zealand shack on August 30, 1912. Wake, the youngest of eight children, was marked as “lucky” by the Maori midwife who delivered her, but it would take decades before that luck would show itself. Wake’s father abandoned her family when she was four and she spent the next twelve years reblling against her mother and siblings before running away when she was sixteen.

In 1932, using an inheritence from an aunt, she headed to London where she trained to be a journalist. She received her first assignment in the Hearst newspaper chain by claiming to speak fluent Egyptian. The editor of the paper, an Egyptophile, was impressed (and apparently easily duped) and sent her to Paris. Wake flourished, not just professionally but socially, eventually marrying Henri Flocca, a shipping magnate, in 1939. A year later the Nazis invaded France.

Wake spent the next six years fighting for the resistance (maquis), using her husband’s money and her own intelligence and bravery, to save refugees, bribe guards, and save prisoners. She was sent to London to train in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) program where she learned the arts of espionage.

Returning to France, Wake helped organize Resistance groups and using her London contacts supplied them with weapons. Wake led raids of German weapons caches, blew up bridges, and derailed trains. She even killed a man bare-handed. “She is the most feminine woman I know until the fighting starts — then she is like five men,” said one member of the French Resistance. She was so difficult to catch that the Gestapo referred to her as “The White Mouse.”

Prior to D-Day, Wake was sent deep into German-occupied France to cause disruptions while keeping radio contact with the SOE. When her radio operator burned their codebooks after a Nazi attack, Wake bicycled 250 miles in three days through Nazi territory to deliver the needed information to London.

After the end of the war, Wake became the most-decorated Allied servicewoman in World War II receiving the Medal of Freedom from the United States, the George Medal from Britain and the Medaille de la Résistance from France. But that was the highlight of her after-war life. She discovered that her husband was executed by the Nazis in 1943 for failing to give away her whereabouts. She also experienced a post-war letdown as the day-to-day excitement of battle and espionagemgave way to the day-to-day monotony of peace.

Wake eventually moved to Australia with her second husband, lived there for thirty years. She returned to London after his death in 1990 in the hopes of recapturing the memories from her time in the military. She lived in the St. James Hotel - paid for by the hotel and Wake’s friends - where she could be often found, beginning in the morning, at the bar drinking gin-and-tonics.

Wake was a few weeks shy of her 100th birthday.

(Image courtesy of Penny Dreadful Vintage. Additional sources for this post: London Daily Telegraph and the Minneapolis Star Tribune.)