1. Most of what we know about Stephano, Baron de Bissy, is in a memorandum that he addressed to the U.S. “Senate” on Dec. 15, 1776 (University of Pa. Library); a duplicate, dated Feb. 6, 1777, is in the APS and bears a notation by BF: “Memoire from a Person who has some Ingenuity, but seems at present a little extra. I was oblig’d to promise a Friend that I would send it to Congress. [In another hand:] B. Franklin.” Bissy, according to his memorandum, came of a Lombard family and was in his late forties, with an English wife and four children. He was an inventor and artilleryman who had served on land and sea; he claimed to have a secret weapon, as yet untested in action but of enormous power, and gave no hint of what it was. He asked to be a lieutenant general (he was then a captain) with a staff of fifty, all captains or higher, whom he would recruit; Congress would pay their expenses from the day of enlistment, and each would receive a land grant proportioned to his rank. This was the bizarre document that BF reluctantly forwarded. Bissy later invited him to witness a demonstration of his weapon: below, Sept. 14, 1777. It was probably a new kind of oar for warships. Bissy had been pestering the Academy with this idea since 1774; three successive committees investigated it, and it was gently but firmly rejected. Archives de l’Academie royale des sciences, procès-verbaux, XCVI (1777), July 19, Nov. 23, Dec. 23.

2. The note to this point is in an unidentified hand; the rest is in Dangeul’s.