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A century ago, Gustave Xhrouet dealt with rats by staging festive fights between dogs and rats.

At 83, in 1936, old Gustave still lives in his caravan on the edge of Saint Ouen, wearing a hat made of rat fur. Rats were his whole life: livelihood, past glory, pride. He still breeds a few hundred for the modest ratodrome he runs there, nothing like the grander one he'd opened at Porte Maillot at the turn of the century, the first in Paris.

Sundays drew crowds to watch dogs fight rats: a dog (ratter, fox terrier, German shepherd) thrown into a small wire cage with a swarm of panicked rats. Timekeepers clocked the kills, up to five in under thirty seconds, while bettors watched frenzied.

Gustave invented variants like the cigar box and the cooking pot; most popular was the flowerpot game, five or six overturned pots hiding one rat, the dog racing to sniff it out. In July 1907, his ratodrome hosted the Ratier Club de France finals before 300 spectators. The real purpose was hygienic: training dogs to hunt rats efficiently in stables, warehouses, and homes.

Gustave had picked up the idea as a child in Spa, Belgium, where it was popular at the local velodrome, before moving to Paris in 1863. During the 1870 Prussian siege of Paris, food shortages forced people to eat dogs, cats, even rats, and at 17 he became a skilled rat hunter selling his catches.

His ratodrome declined after 1914. Feeling old and forgotten, he found one last use in 1915: training 1,200 army dogs to clear rat infested trenches.

In 1900, during the Paris World’s Fair, an original attraction was installed: a large moving walkway called the “Street of the Future.”

It was 3.5 km long and allowed visitors to move more easily between the different places of the exhibition.

There were two moving walkways, one going at 4 km/h and the other at 8 km/h. About 40,000 people used it every day, and it only took 26 minutes to complete the whole journey.

This invention was very modern for the time and was even filmed by Thomas Edison (video here).