Nicolas Noël, the founder of the Flie factory, was born on April 11, 1837, in Volkrange, near Thionville, and died on March 28, 1914, in Liverdun, where he was the mayor from 1900 to 1902. Man of genius , his first invention, a mower-harvester, won him the first prize, with gold medal, at the agricultural competition of Laon. It was in his travels in all parts of the world that he noticed the insufficiency of the means of exhaustion or of water supply. He then had the idea of creating a simple, robust and practical pump model, and in 1865 founded a pump factory in Paris.
But, in 1871, due to major road works, he was expropriated and came to settle in his native Lorraine, in Liverdun, where he had the Flie factory built in 1892, between the railway and the Moselle, with a foundry of 80 workers to manufacture hand pumps, motor, deep well, suction and treading … Orders quickly flowed in and Noël pumps were shipped to all continents by train and transatlantic. The products went daily to Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Ivory Coast, Cape Town, Madagascar, Reunion, India, Indochina, Australia, Mexico…
For his constant innovations, Nicolas Noël was honored with countless prizes at exhibitions in France, but also abroad, such as in Melbourne or London. Raised to the rank of Knight of the Legion of Honor and Knight of the Royal Order of Portugal, he was also promoted to the rank of Officer of Agricultural Merit.
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