Building the Path to Progress — Albert Augustus Perdonnet
Albert Augustus Perdonnet was one of a number of progressive-minded young engineers driven out of France by the resurgence of ultra-conservative politics early in the 19th century, but he returned to train the crop of young engineers who transformed France into an industrial power.
Perdonnet completed his studies in England, where he could study the methods and benefits of technological progress firsthand. He returned to France just as popular revolt, in the 1830s, brought in a government more receptive to ideas of technological progress. Perdonnet soon established himself as a professor at the newly-established school to train engineers to work in private industry, the Ecole Centrale.
Perdonnet also was a member of the team of engineers who built the first passenger railway in France, the line between Saint-Germain and Paris, in 1837. Recalling the nearly overwhelming skepticism that they had to overcome, Perdonnet wrote, “I was treated as a madman for delivering at L’Ecole Centrale a course of lectures on railroads, and announcing that the invention of them would bring about a revolution like that effected by the invention of printing.
The success of the St. Germain road gave the lie to the adversaries of this new mode of travel; and [the Minister for Public Works] was willing to admit that railroads presented some advantages for the transport of passengers so long as their use was limited to a few short lines…” This skepticism did not last long. In 1842, this same government minister announced that France would construct an extensive network of railroads reaching across the country.
Augustus Perdonnet is one of the 72 engineers and scientists named on the Eiffel Tower.
Reference:
Railroad accidents: their causes and the means of preventing them.
by Émile With, with an introduction by Auguste Perdonnet. Translated from the French, with an appendix, by G. Forrester Barstow. Little Brown and Co., 1856.
