General Ferrié is among those figures in Dufy’s mural whose achievement has been particularly felt in France.  As a military engineer he revolutionized the field of communications by developing the first wireless, or radiotelegraphic, network for the French army.

Gustave Auguste Ferrié was born November 19, 1868, in the commune of St. Michel-de-Maurienne, Savoie, and earned a degree in engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique in 1889.  He began a career in the army as a member of the Corps of Engineers, where he was designated a telegraph officer.

Given the job of improving the telegraphy of the French army, he began working on wireless communications systems.  In 1903 he transformed military radiotelegraphy by employing the newly developed electrolytic detector, a precursor of the vacuum tube, to receive radio waves.  In the same year he erected a radio communications antenna on the Eiffel Tower which had a range of up to 6000 km, or 3700 miles.  Then in 1914, just before the beginning of World War I, he mass-produced his own model of triode, or amplifying vacuum tube, which facilitated the amplification of an electronic signal so it could be broadcast as a radio wave, the essential element of radiotelegraphy.  

During the war he oversaw the construction and deployment over 10,000 radio receivers.  Because long-distance radio transmission is affected by time differences, he turned his attention after the war to the problem of unifying measurements of universal time, supporting the establishment of the Bureau International de l’Heure at the Paris Observatory to solve this problem.  In 1922 he was named a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

Ferrié’s research brought about major advancements in communications, its effects extending well beyond their military applications, as witnessed by the existence of, not only radio transmissions, but also wireless telephone networks, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth systems.  Perhaps it is also in part thanks to Ferrié’s experiments that the Eiffel Tower has not been demolished but has become the French symbol it is today.

General Ferrié, sporting his general’s uniform, is standing next to his wireless telegraph, or radio, the last figure on the left side of la Fée Electricité.