Henri Babinski

Life and career

Henri Joseph Séverin Babinski was born on 2 July 1855 in the Montparnasse district of Paris. His parents, Alexandre and Henriette, were Polish émigrés who had fled to France after the 1848 uprising. A younger brother, Joseph, arrived in 1857.

Alexandre worked as a surveyor-engineer for the Paris city government, but in 1863 he returned to Poland to join another rebellion, leaving his wife and sons behind. The boys attended the École polonaise, which Henri later recalled as brutally strict, and from 1870 the Lycée René Descartes. Joseph stayed there until earning his baccalauréat in 1875, while Henri left earlier to enter the École Nationale des Mines in 1874.

Mining engineer

Babinski graduated as a civil mining engineer in 1878 and began extensive travels in 1880, studying mineral deposits across the globe. His work took him to South America, the equatorial region, the western United States, French Guiana, and northern Italy.

In 1893, while back in Chile, he devised a system for towing coal barges through the Strait of Magellan using tugs powered by locally mined coal. Three years later, he traveled to Brazil to inspect diamond mines in Bahia, where he established a successful mining operation. In many of these remote locations, decent food was scarce.

Retirement

After more than two decades as a prosperous mining consultant, with assignments stretching from Siberia to the Transvaal, Babinski retired to Paris. His mother had died in 1897, his father in 1899, leaving his brother Joseph—by then a renowned neurologist—alone in the family apartment at 170 bis Boulevard Haussmann. Henri moved in with him. According to a 2009 biography, in their bachelor household Henri took charge, making up for all the years he had spent roughing it in camps.

From then on, Babinski traveled purely for enjoyment. In 1909 he visited Constantinople, drawn by curiosity about Turkish dishes like pilaf, imam bayıldı, and kebab. He later journeyed from country to country and province to province, gathering material for his book, Gastronomie pratique.

Did You Know?

• Henri Babinski's younger brother Joseph was a leading neurologist.
• Babinski's pen name 'Ali-Bab' may allude to Ali Baba from One Thousand and One Nights, possibly inspired by his 1909 visit to Constantinople.
• His book Gastronomie pratique won him a prize of 10,000 francs from the Comité de la Vigne.
• The book was not translated into English until 1974, 67 years after its first publication.
• Babinski's recipes include Yorkshire pudding and plum pudding from England, as well as grog in American and Indian versions.