Claude Francois Jouffroy D'Arbans, marquis de, a French mechanician, born about 1751, died in Paris in 1832. The idea of steamboats occurred to him first in 1775, on occasion of his examining a fire engine;,but he failed in the experiment which he made with a small propeller on the river Doubs in the summer of 1776. Other experiments in 1780 and 1783 on the same river and on the Saone at Lyons were less unsatisfactory, though far from successful; and the government, after referring the matter to the academy, declined (1784) to grant him a patent, whereupon he went to ' England. He did not return to France until the consulate, when he became acquainted with Fulton. In 1816 he received permission to form a company, and the count of Artois allowed him to give his name of Charles Philippe to the first steamer, which was launched on the Seine Aug. 20. But the enterprise, as well as that of a rival company, ended disastrously, and the marquis retired after the July revolution to the Invalides, where he died of the cholera. He wrote Memoires sur les pompes a feu for the academy, and published in 1816 Les bateaux-a-vapeur. His claim to the discovery of steam navigation was acknowledged by Arago, and in 1840 by the French academy; and Fulton spoke highly of his invention. - His son Achille, marquis de, born about 1790, was an ardent legitimist politician and writer, but after the revolution of 1830 devoted himself to the perfecting of steamboats, invented an unsuccessful system of railway propulsion, and published several works on history, inventions, etc.