The Man Who Invented the Marathon

The Paris Olympics’ picturesque marathon course will take runners past many of the city’s highlights—the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre’s glass pyramid, the Eiffel Tower. But it will miss, by miles, a nondescript one-block street in the 13th arrondissement named Rue Michel-Bréal. That’s a shame, given that Michel Bréal is the reason anyone ever ran a marathon on purpose. Without a Bréal brainstorm and a letter he wrote in 1894, the number of people who run marathons each year would be zero instead of more than 1 million. A lot...