Jean-Baptiste Soleil Jean-Baptiste Soleil </div>Jean-Baptiste François Soleil (1798–1878) was a French optician and engineer. In 1819, Soleil founded an eponymous company at 23 Passage Vivienne in Paris, specialised in making optics instruments for such notable researchers as Fresnel, Arago, Foucault and Babinet. In 1825 he moved business to 21, rue de l'Odéon . In 1843, he made a heliostat for Jean Thiébault Silbermann. In 1849, the business was split between to divisions under his son Henri Soleil, and his son-in-law Jules Duboscq. The Soleil division went on under Laurent Soleil, and has now been renamed to Jobin Yvon. The Duboscq division was
The empire on which the sun never sets Empire". From the mid-nineteenth century, the image of the sun never setting can be found applied to Anglophone culture, explicitly including both the British Empire and the United States, for example in a speech by Alexander Campbell in 1852: "To Britain and America God has granted the possession of the new world; and because the sun never sets upon our religion, our language and our arts...". By the end of the century, the phrase was also being applied to the United States alone. An 1897 magazine article titled "The Greatest Nation on Earth" boasted, "[T]he sun never sets on Uncle