Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe

The Deutsch de la Meurthe was a French family known for its wealth and patronage in technology and philanthropy, having helped develop the industrial oils industry in France. In 1845, Alexander Deutsch founded a company for the processing and marketing of vegetable oils in La Villette, then an independent commune of Paris. With the discovery of petroleum oil in Pennsylvania in 1859, Deutsch began to study and develop the use of petroleum oils in France. In 1877, Deutsch brought his two sons, Henri and Emile, into the family business, which bought a refinery in Rouen in 1881 and another in St. Loubès in Gironde in 1883. In 1889, in association with the Rothschild brothers, oil refining began in Spain. At this time, Alexander added the "de la Meurthe" to the family name. His daughter Suzanne was a noted philanthropist.

Henri recognized that the future of petroleum sales depended on the development of small internal-combustion engines, so he promoted automobile development (he presented French President Marie François Sadi Carnot with an automobile) and also became interested in aviation. Together with Ernest Archdeacon, he founded the Aéro-Club de France to promote the new technologies. To do this, he used some of his wealth to create a number of monetary prizes as incentives for aviators to achieve certain aviation milestones.

In 1906, Deutsch entered into a partnership with Wilbur Wright and Hart O. Berg to establish a company in France to supply a Wright aircraft to the French government. Deutsch financed the venture by buying the only block of shares to be sold in France, and used his influence with the French government. The effort fell through, however.

He supported Lazare Weiller, who bought the patents of the Wright brothers, and organized demonstration flights piloted by Wilbur Wright in Le Mans, which began on 8 August 1908. Deutsch de la Meurthe also invested in aircraft builders Société Astra (1909) and Nieuport (1911), and commissioned the construction of aircraft, including the Blériot XXIV Limousine and the Voisin Aero-Yacht.

At the end of May 1909, Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe offered the University of Paris a sum of 500,000 francs and an annual pension of 15,000 francs for the creation and maintenance of the Institut Aérotechnique at Saint-Cyr-l'École, which would continue the theoretical research and development of air transport aircraft. It was later integrated into the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.

Although an enthusiastic promoter of heavier-than-air flight, De la Meurthe did not make his first flight in an airplane until May 1911, when he was taken for a flight in a Blériot monoplane piloted by Alfred Leblanc.

On 21 May 1911, Deutsch was injured, and French Minister of War Maurice Berteaux was killed at the beginning of the 1911 Paris to Madrid air race, when a monoplane piloted by Louis Émile Train made a forced landing and ran into a group of people, including cabinet members, who had spilled out of the enclosures and onto the flying field.