Joseph de l'Etoile was born on October 30, 1842, in St-Roch-des-Aulnaies, L'Islet, Quebec.
He was a civil servant at the Department of the Interior in Ottawa and an inventor, working on Canada's only known airline project to the Klondike in the late 1800s. The inventor's ultimate goal was to build an airship that would transport passengers, freight, and mail between Edmonton and the Klondike, nearly 1,900 km to the northwest. In 1871, he applied for a grant from the federal government to build a military flying machine, but his request was denied. In 1882, he presented a paper on his inventions at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Montreal. In 1885, just after the outbreak of the North-West Rebellion led by Louis David Riel, he proposed the creation of a military unit equipped with observation balloons. He never received any financial support to realize his plans.
In 1872, he married Grace McCullough (1849–1894) and in 1894, he remarried Rose Delaney (1874–1935). He died on May 23, 1902, in Ottawa, Ontario.
Charles de Mestral was born in Montreal in 1944. He obtained a B.A. Philosophy and English Literature, University of Toronto in 1996; an M.A. University of Montreal in 1970; a McGill B.Mus. (composition studies with Allan Heard, Mario Bertoncini, Harry Freedman) in 1976 and a Ph.D. University of Montreal (thesis on the particularity of the aesthetic of Georg Lukacs) in 1981. In 2007-08, he studied language and ancient Chinese thought at the Asian Studies Centre of the East, University of Montreal.
Charles de Mestral was an active member of the Montreal band Sonde as composer, performer, sound sculptor, and designer of electronic systems from 1975-2010. Sonde produced more than a hundred public events (concerts, performance accompaniments, sound installations, emissions, film music) and more than a hundred electroacoustic compositions for execution (usually) live in Quebec, Ontario and in Paris, London, Berlin, Lyon, and Bristol.
From 1987 to 1990, Charles was Secretary of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC).
Charles has held several teaching positions in Montreal at the Cégep du Vieux Montreal. From 1968 to 2007, Charles was Professor of Philosophy and coordinator of the Philosophy department from 1990 to 2000. From 1997 to 2007, Charles was Professor of Arts and Letters in the Communications Program and coordinator of the program from 2001 to 2006. Retired since June 2007, he lectures as part of the People's University Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, the Montreal UPOP (the People's University of Montreal) and the University of the Third Age.
Charles de Mestral currently (2016) resides in Montreal.
René-Gabriel de Rabié was born in 1717 in Rochefort, France. Rochefort was established by Louis XIV as an arsenal and shipyard for the French Navy, and the young de Rabié trained to be a naval engineer (ingénieur). In 1742, he sailed for Saint Domingue (now Haiti), the richest of the French Caribbean colonies. In the 1770s, de Rabié became the chief engineer for the north part of Saint Domingue and designed many of the public monuments and buildings in Le Cap Français (now Cap Haitien), the chief port. He was also an accomplished cartographer and his manuscript maps are held in the Archives Nationales d’outre-mer and the Bibliothèque nationale in France and in the British Library.
In 1767, de Rabié began to paint watercolours of the plants and animals of Saint-Domingue. Aided by his eldest daughter, Jaquette Marie Anne (born 1750), his grandson Armand Gabriel Paparel de la Boissière, and his enslaved servants, he completed 266 watercolours of birds, plants, insects, shells, fish and crustaceans found chiefly in the gardens and forests and in the sea around Le Cap before his return to France in 1784. He died in Paris in early 1785
