Jacques Balmat Jacques Balmat Jacques Balmat, called "le Mont Blanc" (1762–1834) was a mountaineer, a Savoyard mountain guide, born in the Chamonix valley in Savoy, at this time part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. A chamois hunter and collector of crystals, Balmat completed the first ascent of Mont Blanc with physician Michel-Gabriel Paccard on 8 August 1786. For this feat, King Victor Amadeus III gave him the honorary title "le Mont Blanc". Balmat and Paccard's ascent of Mont Blanc was a major accomplishment in the early history of mountaineering. C. Douglas Milner wrote "The ascent itself was magnificent; an amazing feat of
Horace-Bénédict de Saussure Chamonix men, Michel Paccard and Jacques Balmat, attained the summit in 1786, by way of the Grands Mulets, and in 1787 Saussure himself made the third ascent of the mountain. His achievements did much to attract tourists to places such as Chamonix. Obsessed by the measurement of meteorological phenomena, Saussure invented and improved many kinds of apparatus, including the magnetometer, the cyanometer for estimating the blueness of the sky, the diaphanometer for judging the clarity of the atmosphere, the anemometer and the mountain eudiometer. Of particular importance was a hair hygrometer that he devised and used for a series of