Engine of Change — Cail

Jean-François Cail’s strategy was to master a new technology that would become an engine for technological change and then use this knowledge to dominate a growing, new industry. In this way Cail’s career followed the swiftly rising arc characteristic of high-tech entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs and the personal computer, Bill Gates and the MSDOS operating system and Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Cail learned the boilermaker’s trade and moved to Paris, at age 11, to find work in a machine shop. In 1824, he was 20 years old and a partner in a firm that built industrial equipment used in distillation and in refining sugar. Twenty years later, Cail was sole owner of an enterprise with a large factory at Grenelle, near the site of the Eiffel Tower, manufacturing heavy equipment for railways and industrial plants. Cail’s firm survives today as part of the Fives Group, an industrial conglomerate that designs and builds industrial plants all over the world.

The firm of Derosne and Cail built the Crampton locomotive at their factory in Grenelle. The Crampton was the TGV of the 19th century. It was designed by an English engineer, but it was used more widely on routes of the national rail network in France. The distinguishing feature of a Crampton locomotive was the large drive wheel positioned at the rear, behind the firebox. This allowed the boiler to be positioned below the axle, which lowered the center of gravity and increased stability. Crampton locomotives were capable of high speeds, around 120 km per hour. Their popularity in France was the result of the conservative French approach to track design, which favored gentle grades (slopes) and wide-radius curves that made it possible to run trains at high speeds.

Jean-François Cail is one of the 72 engineers and scientists named on the Eiffel Tower.