French doctor, pharmacist and engineer, he devoted part of his fortune to the realization of a crazy and surreal project, the first submarine ever designed in the world, Le Belledonne.
On the morning of 20 April 1844, Parisians discovered a strange cylindrical machine on the surface of the Seine. A crowd of spectators was present to observe this scientific revolution measuring more than 9 m long, 2.8 m wide and weighing more than ten tonnes. Prosper-Antoine Payerne and Mr. Poirée, delegate of the Minister of Public Works, immersed themselves in the Le Belledonne prototype for three hours without the slightest supply of outside air. It was a success.
For a few years, Le Belledonne sailed from Paris to Brest to be used for the extraction of granite rock and the digging of a channel on other sites. According to the contemporary dictionary published in 1880 by Hachette, the submarine was also used in Cherbourg and Paris for “difficult work”. The future Napoleon III, invested in the projects of Prosper-Antoine Payerne, promising financial assistance to develop the Belledonne II but these promises remained without a future.
In addition, in 1852, Prosper-Antoine Payerne designed a Channel tunnel project linking Calais to Dover in 33 minutes. This project was valued at a price of 240 million gold francs and consisted of building a 17-m-wide causeway at the end of the Channel which would allow two railways protected by a system of stones to pass. The engineer claimed that this work could be done by forty submarines like his Le Belledonne prototype. The project was supported by the government at the time but was abandoned for lack of technical solutions to the waterproofing problems.
Prosper-Antoine Payerne died on 11 April 1886 at age 80 in Cherbourg-en-Cotentin.
Link to Wikipedia biography (French)