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Some enterprises become monuments to their founders, and some founders spend their whole lives as an appendix to the enterprise. Jules Richard belonged to the second kind — and, it seems, quite deliberately.
Having grown wealthy enough to afford a townhouse in the western districts of Paris, he stayed on in the working-class nineteenth arrondissement, literally across the road from his own workshops, on a street that managed to change its name during his lifetime. His surname appeared on the instruments recording air pressure at the summit of the Eiffel Tower, on the barographs that sailed with the Antarctic expedition of the Belgica, on the stereo cameras carried by trench-war officers, colonial officials and travellers whose names mean nothing to anyone today. And yet he left behind neither memoirs, nor a legend about himself, nor even descendants.
The story usually called "the House of Richard" is normally told as a family saga: the founding father, the brothers, the Richard Frères brand, the split, the rivalry. But that is an error of perspective. The father founded the business and ruined it; the brothers left the game in the early 1890s and went into bicycles and motor cars. Everything else — half a century of invention, a hundred patents, two entirely different branches of manufacturing, a factory employing three hundred people, a trade school, a photographic archive of two hundred thousand glass plates — was the work of one man, who in 1876 took over a loss-making workshop with a single employee and a debt of nearly a hundred thousand francs.
And that is where it gets interesting. Having no heirs, Richard left the business not to family but to an employee. And the firm, against every convention of the genre, did not fall apart: it outlived its creator by almost a century, changing everything along with the age — its products, its technology, its address and its name — while keeping the name that mattered. Today, in 2026, it still appears on boxes of temperature sensors monitoring the cold chain in pharmaceutical warehouses.
The business was founded in Paris by Félix Richard (1809–1876), a Lyonnais by origin, an optician and instrument maker. His speciality was the metal "Bourdon-Richard" barometer: he bought a share of Eugène Bourdon's patent for the metal (aneroid) barometer and put it into production. Different sources date the firm's origin to either 1845 or 1851. Félix was, among other things, an amateur photographer; one of the oldest daguerreotypes of Lyon is attributed to him.
From there the plot followed the classic script of decline: Félix became mayor of the nineteenth arrondissement of Paris, neglected the business, and lost much of his fortune in stock speculation and in the catastrophe of 1870. He died on 14 July 1876, leaving the company with a debt of 92,000 francs and practically no production — a single workman remained, on repairs.
Félix had four sons: the eldest, Antoine Albert, who went his own way; Jules; Félix, nicknamed Max (1856–1949); and Georges (1863–1922). At their mother's request, Jules took charge of the failing business on 26 November 1876, giving up his post in the telegraph and telephone administration to do so. A "triangular" arrangement emerged: Jules the inventor and technician, Max in commerce, and later Georges in production. Instruments were sold under the Richard Frères brand with its "RF" monogram. In 1889 the firm installed a meteorological station at the top of the newly built Eiffel Tower.
The partnership lasted fifteen years. In 1891 Jules bought out his brothers' shares before the notary Delafond and became sole proprietor, keeping the firm's name. What followed was a long and ugly conflict: Max, bound by a non-compete undertaking, opened his own photographic-goods business; the litigation, which began with a court ruling in 1893, ended in 1899 in Jules's favour. Max and Georges then moved into bicycle and automobile manufacturing — their name survives in the history of the Richard-Brasier marque.
The break was final. In his will, drawn up thirty years later, Jules still returns to the episode; and a letter written by Max in 1938, eight years after his brother's death, still speaks of his "treachery". At this point the family line in this story ends, and from here on it concerns one man.
Jules Nicolas Richard was born on 19 December 1848 in Lyon; the family lived at 11 quai Saint-Antoine. He received no systematic education: at fourteen he was already an apprentice in his father's workshop; around 1863 he was apprenticed for three years to a watchmaker named Collin, then worked in various workshops. In 1866 he joined the telegraph administration as a technician, later working in telephony. He was exempted from military service because of a badly set fracture.
Two influences decided his youth: photography and physiology. From 1868 he was a keen amateur photographer. Around 1872–1873 he carried out work for Étienne-Jules Marey, the physiologist and inventor of the "photographic gun", the man who taught science to record movement. Richard said he intended to follow Marey's path, and in essence that is what he did all his life: he built machines that record by themselves — pressure, temperature, humidity, wind, smoke, the tension of rubber, and in the case of the stereo camera, visible reality itself, with its depth preserved.
He never married and had no children. His circle consisted of clients who became friends: Achille Lemoine, the mountaineer and traveller Jules Jacot-Guillarmod, Armand Blanchet, Pierre Domange; he served as witness at some of their weddings. His relationship with his workers was distinctly paternalistic: he founded a trade school at his own expense, worried about alcoholism on the shop floor, and when the business was converted into a joint-stock company he transferred a substantial portion of the shares to workers and staff.
The state honoured him in ascending order: Chevalier of the Legion of Honour (2 April 1894), Officer (30 October 1920), Commander (decree of 10 March 1925). Besides his Paris property he owned the Chantemerle estate at Aix-les-Bains. His eightieth birthday in 1928 was celebrated lavishly. Jules Richard died on 18 June 1930 in a nursing home at Saint-Mandé and is buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery (division 89); his tomb bears a bronze medallion with his profile.
In 1880 Richard patented a recording barometer — the barograph — and the instrument was a considerable commercial success, defining the firm's profile for decades to come.
The catalogue grew rapidly and moved well beyond meteorology. The core range consisted of barographs, thermographs, hair hygrographs, combined thermo-barographs, tipping-bucket pluviographs and anemographs recording both wind speed and the four cardinal directions at once. Alongside them stood specialised industrial recorders, a list that reads like a catalogue of the age's preoccupations: a snowfall recorder, an anemometer with paper feed, a dynamometric recorder for electric tramways, an astronomical chronograph-regulator, a "brontometer" for observing thunderstorms, a smoke recorder, the Bedoux meter for alcohol, and a dynamometric instrument for studying the tension and rupture of rubber.
Richard's instruments equipped the observatories of the day, including Camille Flammarion's observatory at Juvisy. Adrien de Gerlache's Antarctic expedition aboard the Belgica (1897) carried a series of his instruments — and a Vérascope into the bargain.
The production base stood in the impasse Fessart, which in 1899, after being extended, was renamed rue Mélingue, in the nineteenth arrondissement. The firm occupied numbers 23–25 and 27; Richard himself lived nearby, in a private house (number 29, according to some sources). By 1900 this amounted to some 1,500 m² of workshops, around 150 employees, a steam engine and a dynamo. Forty-five patents were already credited to Richard at that point; over his lifetime he filed around a hundred.
The firm was an official supplier to the ministries of War and the Navy, of Public Instruction, and to the Ponts et Chaussées administration; its advertising, not one to undersell, added "and all foreign governments". It exhibited at world and international fairs — Paris 1900, Düsseldorf 1902, Hanoi 1902, St Louis 1904, Liège 1905, Zaragoza and London 1908, Brussels 1910, Ghent 1913 — and listed the resulting awards diligently on its catalogues.
Richard registered the Vérascope trademark on 19 March 1891 and filed the patent for the camera itself on 21 January 1893. The Vérascope was an all-metal stereo camera, produced in the 45×107 mm and 6×13 cm formats.
The technical idea he defended against fashion had two parts. First, the lenses should be spaced wider than the interpupillary distance if convincing relief is wanted. Second, a compact frame — initially around 4×4 cm — is entirely sufficient, in an era when amateurs hauled 13×18 cameras about. The commercial arguments followed: durability, resistance to the tropics, low weight and size, and above all the promise of a "true image", guaranteed to align with nature.
The range expanded quickly:
Richard and Colardeau filed around twenty joint patents; in 1923 the physicist published his Traité général de stéréoscopie. Adapting the Vérascope to the Lumière brothers' autochromes was a separate engineering problem: the thicker plates required a magazine holding eight instead of twelve, while the image-inversion problem was solved with prisms or by cutting the plate.
The scale of success shows in the advertised figures: 14,000 Vérascopes sold by November 1904, 18,000 by May 1906, 20,200 Vérascopes and 6,500 Glyphoscopes by November 1907. The Legion of Honour file of 1925 gives the final order of magnitude: around 120,000 stereo cameras of his design in circulation, counting Vérascopes and Glyphoscopes together.
Richard treated competitors without sentiment and secured a court conviction against the German manufacturer Otto Spitzer for his imitative "Véroscope". Among the users named are Pierre Loti, the King of Spain and the Russian Empress; a separate legend concerns a gold Vérascope costing 25,000 francs, made for the Sultan of Morocco.
The sales network was built up just as methodically. Besides the workshop-cum-shop on rue Mélingue, there were Paris outlets on rue Lafayette (opened in 1899 at number 3, fitted out by the architect Dubuisson), rue Halévy (number 10) and rue Meyerbeer. The firm's own London shop at 27 New Bond Street opened in 1910 in the presence of the French ambassador and Lord Redesdale. Agents and concessionaires operated in Brussels, New York (on Fifth Avenue), Buenos Aires, Geneva, Rome, Milan and Turin. Documentation was published in French, Spanish, Italian, English, German and Portuguese.
The originality of his business model lay in the firm selling not only cameras but also what was taken with them. Richard bought negatives from his own customers returning from their travels, and on that basis assembled a holding of some 200,000 stereo negatives on glass.
The growth in "subjects" is documented in the advertising: 20,000 (1904), 45,000 (1907), 58,000 (1908), 68,000 (1909), more than 130,000 by the summer of 1914. The 1914 catalogue divided the collection into dozens of thematic series by country and region. The largest single contributor to the collection was Richard himself — more than 25,000 images.
A distinct and entirely deliberate part of the enterprise was erotica: the pictures were made in a purpose-built set called the "Atrium" beside the factory (around 1908), and the L'Art érotique catalogues appeared in 1900 and 1902 and were distributed by post. The merchant in Richard was no less consistent than the engineer.
Today the Jules-Richard collection — roughly 200,000 stereoscopic views on glass plates, taken between 1890 and 1930 — is held in the photo library of the Hachette Livre group and is the subject of academic study, notably the doctoral work of Selma Ahmed-Chaouch at the Université Paris Cité.
During the war the firm supplied military equipment, including aviation instruments; some of its workers were given "special assignment" status at the plant, and several photographers and staff were killed. Richard funded auxiliary hospital no. 198 in Paris.
The Vérascope circulated widely among Allied officers — the war became the last great subject of amateur stereo photography. The firm itself issued more than 1,600 "war" stereo views.
On 15 October 1921, at the age of seventy-two, Richard converted the business into the Société anonyme des Établissements Jules Richard (articles drawn up before the notary Chauveau). He transferred the real estate to the company — the factories at 25 and 27 rue Mélingue, the houses at 24, 26 and 28, the house at 33 rue Fessart, and the Chantemerle estate — retaining the usufruct of part of it, and took the chair of the board. He placed two trusted men in charge of the enterprise: the engineer Paul Perrin and the commercial director Ernest Émile Henrard. After the war the firm employed over three hundred workers and staff; in another formulation of the time, it "fed 250 families".
An original bearer share of the Société Anonyme des Établissements Jules Richard, issued in Paris on 1 January 1922 and signed by both Jules Richard and E. Henrard, can be seen in the ephemera section.
In 1923, under an agreement with the City of Paris, Richard used his own funds to establish a foundation and a trade school bearing his name; it opened in 1924. Today it is the private technological lycée Jules Richard in the nineteenth arrondissement, specialising in microtechnology; the school marked its centenary in 2024.
Richard drew up his will on 27 January 1922. In it he set out, in detail and almost pedantically, the history of his father's ruin and the conflict with his brother Max — as though he wanted the circumstances placed on record. He named Ernest Émile Henrard, commercial managing director of the House of Jules Richard, as his universal legatee. The executors appointed were Henrard himself, Paul Perrin (who in the event died in 1928, before Richard) and the director Louis Albert Bruneau. Individual bequests went to the son of the widow of his eldest brother Albert — the one family tie never severed — to his goddaughter Henriette Lemoine, the daughter of a friend, and to other close associates.
The decision had its own logic: Richard had no direct heirs, but he did have the men with whom he had built the enterprise. He left the business to them.
Ernest Émile Henrard was the firm's commercial director, Richard's closest colleague and his universal legatee under the will of 1922. It was to him that the management of the enterprise, and with it the marque, passed after Richard's death in 1930.
The archivist Michel Polge, in Le fonds photographique Jules Richard — the most detailed modern study of the Jules Richard collection — names the universal legatee as Ernest Émile Henrard, "directeur de la maison de vente". Numerous archival descriptions, however, use the name Léon Henrard. Moreover, the family grave in Père-Lachaise is inscribed Léon Ernest Henrard. No document found identifies the two names with each other directly, yet it is beyond doubt that one and the same man is meant. "Léon", then, is either a second or everyday given name, or the result of some repeated error, since the date of birth — 13 September 1871 — is identical for Ernest Émile Henrard and Léon Ernest Henrard; the date of death, however, differs between sources by several weeks: Michel Polge's study gives 7 January 1953 at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, while the headstone records 27 January 1953.
No evidence of kinship or marriage connection between Richard and the Henrard family has been found: the inheritance was professional, not familial — a rare case of an industrialist handing on his business on grounds of competence.
Henrard was born on 13 September 1871 in Revin, in the Ardennes, into the family of a foundry worker. Michel Polge, working from military, civil and photographic sources, reports that he was orphaned early. In 1890, at about nineteen, Henrard volunteered for military service in Paris, in the artillery. He served until 1897 and rose to maréchal des logis, roughly the equivalent of a senior non-commissioned officer.
On 6 April 1899, in the tenth arrondissement of Paris, he married Thérèse Ida Fernande Aubé, born on 13 March 1876. She was a watercolour painter; other documents also describe her as a dessinateur décorateur, a decorative artist. Their son, Roger Fernand Auguste Henrard, was born on 17 February 1900.
By 1906 Henrard was already a full member of the Stéréo-Club Français. He practised stereo photography himself at a time when the Vérascope Richard was one of the firm's principal products. His wife Thérèse joined the club the same year. They were then living at 41 rue Jean-François-Lépine, Paris. The picture that emerges is a curious one: the future proprietor of Jules Richard was simultaneously an employee of the firm and a user of its photographic products.
In 1900, at Roger's birth, Henrard still appears simply as employé de commerce. By 1914–1916 his connection with Jules Richard is thoroughly documented. Indeed, during the war the state judged him so necessary to the enterprise that it returned him from military service to work at the firm.
This suggests that Henrard entered the Maison Jules Richard before the First World War, probably in the commercial division. The exact year he first joined, however, is not given by the sources.
After the war began, Henrard, as a former artilleryman, was mobilised once more. He served in the artillery and was promoted to adjudant.
Then, in August 1916, something highly revealing occurred: he was withdrawn from ordinary military service and granted a sursis — a deferment, or special exemption from service — so that he could return to work at Jules Richard.
During the First World War Jules Richard fulfilled military orders; some of the plant's employees were given the status of specialists essential to defence production. The firm manufactured various kinds of precision equipment for the army. Henrard's return in 1916 was therefore not merely a personal favour to his employer: the state considered his work at the enterprise sufficiently important to the war effort. The firm's own history confirms that between 1914 and 1918 it produced military equipment and that some mobilised employees were reclassified as affectés spéciaux.
Notably, Henrard returned not to the factory floor on rue Mélingue but to the maison de vente, the commercial arm of the enterprise. This fits his subsequent career well: his domain was commerce and management, in contrast to the engineer Paul Perrin and the production director Louis Bruneau.
After the First World War his son Roger Henrard joined him at Jules Richard. When the father took over the enterprise following Jules Richard's death, he made Roger his assistant. And here a very fortunate combination began to work: the father handled management, commerce and resources; the son — mechanic, pilot and photographer — was drawn to aviation and to the practical uses of photographic equipment.
Roger Fernand Auguste Henrard was born on 17 February 1900 in Paris, in the tenth arrondissement, at 9 rue des Deux-Gares. He died on 26 June 1975 at Croissy-sur-Seine.
He had no inclination for study and worked from the age of sixteen. His course was set at the Schmidt works, where he assembled onboard instruments for Breguet 14 aircraft; by the end of the war he was posted to a pilot training centre. The sky and precision instrument-making converged in a single biography — and never parted again.
After the war, as noted above, he joined his father at the Établissements Jules Richard (address: 21 rue Carducci / 25 rue Mélingue) and became his assistant. In 1933 he bought an old Farman and fitted it with an automatic Richard-Labrély planiphote — a design by the engineer E. Labrély that allowed continuous serial exposure at 100 km/h; he also used Altiphote instruments of the same design. The firm, in other words, supplied him with his own tool.
In 1938 the weekly L'Illustration published his first aerial views of Paris. In 1938–1939 French intelligence commissioned him to carry out aerial reconnaissance over Germany: more than 10,000 photographs, including the construction of the Siegfried Line, taken from his private aircraft. On 15 May 1939 a Lockheed 12 was registered in his name (F-ARQA), and a second on 2 June (F-ARPP); he conducted these operations together with the Australian Sidney Cotton, flying out of Toussus-le-Noble. In 1939 he was mobilised as a fighter pilot in Jules Roy's squadron, striking up a friendship with him; in 1942 he joined the Allies in North Africa. He held the Croix de guerre and was an Officer of the Legion of Honour (Base Léonore file 19800035/1325/53443).
After the war Henrard concentrated on private aerial photography and methodically covered the whole of France: around 20,000 photographs between 1945 and 1972, widely distributed as postcards. He is the author of the 1,750 aerial photographs of Paris now held at the Musée Carnavalet. He liked to shoot the capital from very low altitudes — sometimes under a hundred metres above the Seine, which served as his emergency landing strip. In 1953 he published his memoirs, Un enragé du ciel, with a preface by Jules Roy.
That same year, 1953, Roger Henrard took over the firm of Jules Richard. Running the enterprise, however, interested him markedly less than aerial photography — a circumstance that explains a good deal about the house's later fortunes in an era when stereo photography was rapidly losing its market.
In 2006–2007 the Musée Carnavalet devoted an exhibition to him, Le Tour de Paris, les promenades aériennes de Roger Henrard (7 November 2006 – 7 January 2007). Earlier, in 1996, Yann Arthus-Bertrand had reissued his Paris photographs for comparison with contemporary views. After his death Henrard's archives were dispersed among numerous departmental and municipal collections — from the Rhône and the Drôme to Saumur — and to the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie.
Roger had a son, Robert Henrard. The present-day firm JRI includes Marc-Robert Henrard, who has worked at the company since 1978 and heads a sector division; he was also elected president of the Réseau Mesure association as JRI's representative. The family line has thus continued into the twenty-first century, although the precise genealogical connection between him and Roger is not documented.
The House of Richard survived its founder without a break. In 1932 the Planiphote was released — an aerial camera in 18×24 format with a 200-exposure capacity, the very equipment Roger Henrard used.
Around 1938 the marque's last stereo camera was developed: the Vérascope F40 — 35 mm film, 24×30 mm frame, rangefinder, lens separation of 64 mm. The war and the German ban on introducing new models delayed it; production actually ran from roughly 1941 to 1957. The F40 was exported to the United States through the Chicago-based Bush Precision Camera Corporation and was regarded as one of the finest stereo cameras of its time. It was also the last: production ceased in 1957, and with it ended the firm's sixty-year history as a maker of stereo equipment.
The cause was not the quality of the cameras. Amateur photography had moved away from glass and from relief: the mass market chose the flat 35 mm frame, cheap printing and simplicity. Stereoscopy became the pursuit of enthusiasts — which is what it remains.
The firm did the only sensible thing available to it: it returned to the first of its two branches. Recording instruments and metrology had not gone anywhere, and demand for them only grew — along with industry, the food sector and pharmaceuticals.
Around 1980 came the technological break: mechanical recording on paper tape gave way to electronics. The company, by then trading as Jules Richard Instruments, acquired Maxant Industries in 1999 — Maxant itself being an old precision-instrument house going back to Léon Maxant (1856–1936). In 2007 Jules Richard Instruments shortened its name to JRI, and in 2008 the merger of JRI and Maxant produced a single company (for a time under the name "JRI Maxant") based at Bezons, in the Val-d'Oise.
So the surname of a self-taught watchmaker's apprentice from Lyon, having changed technology twice, survived into the digital age.
The successor company exists and is trading. JRI (SIREN 380 332 858), with its head office at Bezons (16 rue Louis Rameau) and a production site at Fesches-le-Châtel (Doubs), designs and manufactures temperature sensors and wireless data loggers — the Nano SPY and SPY RF lines, LoRaWAN sensors — the SiriusWeb / MySirius cloud monitoring platform, and provides metrology services: its laboratory has held COFRAC accreditation for temperature since 2011.
Its principal markets are cold-chain monitoring in pharmaceuticals, healthcare, agri-food, logistics and industry. Since 2015 JRI has been part of MMS Group (Metrology & Monitoring Solutions).
The milestones the company lists in its own chronology draw a straight line from 1845: Félix Richard's first metal barometers; 1980, the switch to electronics; 2008, the launch of the SPY RF wireless loggers; 2010, the SiriusWeb cloud platform; 2011, COFRAC accreditation; 2015, entry into MMS Group.
The irony of the history is entirely in Richard's own spirit: an enterprise that began with instruments recording pressure and temperature by themselves is, a hundred and seventy years later, doing exactly the same thing — instruments that record temperature by themselves. Everything has changed except the substance.
Richard's instruments and cameras are held in many museums — the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, the Science Museum Group collections, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford — and circulate actively on the collectors' market. A telling example: a Taxiphote stereoscopic viewing cabinet together with a batch of 700 glass plates sold at auction on 24 March 2023 at La Flèche (Sarthe) for 17,584 euros.
The living tradition is sustained by the Stéréo-Club Français, founded in 1903 by Benjamin Lihou — the oldest stereo photography society in the world; today it has just under three hundred members, half of them living in the Île-de-France, and has published its bulletin since 1904. Some of the archival material and research is available through the image-en-relief.org portal.
A Paris lycée bears Richard's name. Studies have been written about him — J. Perin's two-volume Jules Richard et la magie du relief (1993) and the archivist Michel Polge's extensive work on the firm's photographic collection, which remains the principal source for the documentary side of this story.
Principal documentary sources
Biographical and encyclopaedic
Photographic collection and stereoscopy
Equipment and cameras
Roger Henrard: archives and collections
The present-day company
Literature
