History of Construction Cultures – Mascarenhas-Mateus & Paula Pires (eds)

© 2021 Copyright the Author(s), ISBN 978-1-032-00203-3.

Open Access: www.taylorfrancis.com, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license

Education at the École centrale in Paris and its influence on the creation of
modern iron construction

Tom F. Peters
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, USA

ABSTRACT: In 1829 a businessman and a group of French scientists and engineers established an engineering
school to serve industry. Building on the French excellence in theoretical engineering they developed a pedagogy
based on the concept of “vulgarization” that enabled engineers to function in both theory and practice equally well
rather than simply learning how to apply predeveloped theory to practice. The method they used: a combination of
intellectual communication, visual learning through drawing and tactile learning through workshop experience.
The graduates of the program later helped develop the industrialized form of iron construction. They gained their
initial professional experience in railway construction, the only field that used iron consistently as an industrially
produced material in the first half of the 19th century. The school’s pedagogy was successful and led to the
industrialization of iron construction by the middle of the century. It also initiated changes in existing programs
worldwide.

1 INTRODUCTION Pfammatter (1997) wrote on the content of the cur-

How do we educate innovative engineers? What ped-
agogy will guarantee success? The École centrale des
arts et manufactures in Paris provided an astonish-
ingly successful answer in the first half of the 19th
century. The school developed an innovative peda-
gogy and educated a number of civil and structural
engineers, contractors and industrialists who, together
with their spheres of influence, became prominent and
innovative players in the development of our mod-
ern industrialized form of iron construction. They
defined its system characteristics and self-assuredly
proclaimed its aesthetic value.
The triggering issue for developing a successful
pedagogy was the profound dissatisfaction of the engi-
neering profession with the abstraction of the scientific
approach to knowledge as it had developed in the
course of the 17th and 18th centuries (Weiss 1982: 91–
93) Although it was clear to engineers that the advan-
tages of a scientific understanding of structural and
material behavior were crucial to advancing the field
of construction, it was equally evident that an interface
between understanding and application was lacking.
Science was too abstract and limiting a model for
practical purposes because scientific thought excludes
many minor – or from a scientific standpoint extrane-
ous – factors that practitioners knew were important
in order to achieve a successful result.
The content of a curriculum is only part of an edu-
cational process: it has to be communicated by an
appropriate method based on an intellectual concept
and backed by a school of thought. Weiss (1982) and
riculum, but no one has yet discussed the pedagogy
and how the teachers interacted to make the program
a success.
2 THE CONCEPT
Alphonse Lavallée, an investor in the early railway
development and an influential group of liberal sci-
entists and businessmen surrounding the short-lived
journal Le Globe, recognized in the mid-1820s that
industry was in urgent need of flexibly educated engi-
neers who understood and could build on theory, and
yet were also able to adapt to a rapidly changing
industrial world.
France had recently lost the war, and these men rec-
ognized that Britain had enjoyed a serious advantage
in industrial development that had contributed to its
military might. While Britain’s success rested on pri-
vate initiative, it was equally clear that France enjoyed
an advantage in the well-organized state support of
science, especially through the École Polytechnique
where eminent scientists specialized in developing
the theory of engineering. The question was therefore
how the French qualities could be applied to a liberal
development in the service of industry.
The answer was a private school that bridged the
boundary between analytical science and practical,
industrial application. The first, a private school of
higher education, was unheard of in France; and the
second, the amalgamation of scientific research and
engineering practice, had been prepared by Gaspard

DOI 10.1201/9781003173434-196 645

Monge in his approach to engineering education. He
had developed his border-crossing approach from the
end of the 18th century and had based the foun-
dation of both the short-lived teacher’s college, the
École normale de l’an III (subsequently recreated by
Napoleon in 1808 and later renamed the École nor-
male supérieure), and especially the foundation of the
École polytechnique on his ideas. However, Napoleon
had subverted the new engineering school to become
a military academy in 1804 and then, after the down-
fall of the empire, Laplace had directed it toward pure
scientific research in 1816.
Scientific thought is quite distinct from technolog-
ical thought. Scientists want to understand the world
while technologists want to make functioning objects
(Rankine 1856: 20). Not only are the goals of the two
different, but even their languages. For instance, a sci-
entist commonly uses the term “detail” to denote a
minor and therefore hierarchically less important part
of a problem, while a technologist always uses the same
term to describe a small-scale problem, the solution to
which can be as critical to the functioning of an entity
as its major components. For a technologist, a “detail”
is never “minor”. Monge had avoided the distinction by
relating all his abstract research to everyday practical
problems.
Many of Monge’s former students who concerned
themselves with education, like Charles Dupin or
Théodore Olivier, were inspired by this synthesis and
they were unhappy with the turn toward pure sci-
ence that the École polytechnique had taken under
Laplace. The engineer Dupin complained of it in
his eulogy of Monge in 1819 (Dupin 1819: 80–
8; Pothier 1887: 26) and the mathematician Olivier
strongly expressed his distain of the elitist attitudes
of researchers who engaged in “pure science” to the
detriment of practical engineering in the introduction
to his treatise Mémoires de géométrie descriptive in
1851 (Sakarovitch 1988: 312ff).
They were not the only ones who were troubled by
the inability of most theoreticians to make themselves
not only understood by practitioners but available for
their use. The general dissatisfaction of practitioners
with theory had long bothered engineers from Bélidor
in the 18th century to Navier in the 19th, and it was a
dissatisfaction that Lavallée could build on.
Jean-Baptiste Dumas, an enthusiastic young
chemist, inspired him through his brilliant lectures
at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers (Colladon
1893: 187–191), and together they recruited the mil-
itary engineer Philippe Benoit, the physicist Eugène
Péclet and Olivier to their cause. Established scien-
tists like Sainte-Preuve showed interest in their idea
of a “Sorbonne industrielle”, but only as a small
program through the established university system
(Pothier 1887: 23). This group was unwilling to agree
to that. They had set their sights on the establishment
of a comprehensive, independent and more flexible
private school.
Through a former co-student of Dumas’s in Geneva,
Jean-Daniel Colladon, who had recently moved to
646
Paris, they contacted the newly appointed liberal Min-
ister of Education, Antoine de Vatimesnil, who was
interested in all aspects of education. He agreed to
support their novel idea of a private school against
the established interests of the state schools. This
was a daring political undertaking as the undergrad-
uate École polytechnique, the École des ponts et
chaussées and the Sorbonne were powerful institu-
tions (Comberousse 1879: 33–34; Pothier 1887: 11, 33
and 59–60). What convinced the government was the
idea to supplement the universities of the liberal arts
(Beaux-Arts), the humanities (Sorbonne) and science
(École polytechnique), with a university of the “indus-
trial arts” (Lavallée & Dumas 1835: 3). Vatimesnil’s
tenure (and the whole reform-interested government)
lasted only a year. But the short liberal interlude was
enough of a window of opportunity for the group sur-
rounding Lavallée, who wasted no time in founding
the school.
In reaction to the missing translation between the
two so different and yet interdependent professional
modes of thought, science and technology, the École
centrale’s founders determined to find and develop a
fruitful middle ground between practical empiricism
and theoretical science in the service of industry. The
method they decided on was “vulgarization”.
The meaning of this French term in contrast to
“innovation” lies somewhere between popularizing
and enabling or applying. The key term is enabling
(Langlois & Seignobos 1898: 271) rather than “apply-
ing”. Vulgarization fulfills the intellectual function of
pedagogical incorporation, not just the diffusion of
knowledge, and it implies democratization and inter-
or transdisciplinary cross-fertilization.
The two existing schools that educated engineers in
France at the time could not fulfill this role. The École
polytechnique had deviated from its original goal as
defined by Monge and become a scientifically and
research-oriented undergraduate school in the early
decades of the 19th century. Its educational concept
was based on innovation, while the more practice-
focused graduate École des ponts et chaussées, still
known today as an “école d’application” was based on
the “application” of scientific knowledge to practice,
and it exclusively educated engineers for the state at
the time.
3 THE PROGRAMM AND THE TEACHERS
Lavallée was a gifted negotiator and organizer. He
secured funding from his father-in-law, an expatriate
French businessman in Louisiana, and formed the pri-
vate school with his four partners: Dumas, Benoit,
Péclet and Olivier. They also recruited Pierre-Charles
Gourlier, a technically-minded architect from the state
approval board, the Conseil des bâtiments civils, and
Dumas’s friend the experimental/theoretical physicist
Colladon who had made the initial contact with the
Minister of Education. These two men were intimately
involved in the planning of the school alongside the
five founders, but they were not counted as founders
because they did not commit to long-term teaching
as the agreement of association that the five founders
had signed on 20 January 1829 stipulated. They left the
group after only a few years, while one of the founding
members, Benoit, left before the program even began.
The railway pioneer Eugène Flachat was also inti-
mately involved in the project in its planning stages
and a strong supporter of the concept of vulgarization
(Malo 1873: 12) but he was fully engaged in his engi-
neering practice and decided not to teach but rather
to serve as a post-graduate employer of the graduates
(Belhoste 2008: 60; Malo 1873: 52).
The founders hired Jean-Baptiste Belanger, a
hydraulic engineer who was also a theoretician and
former Monge student; the engineer and railway pio-
neer Auguste Perdonnet; and several others. They were
quickly joined by Louis-Charles Mary, an engineer
who had also studied under Monge. These men were all
committed to the concept of vulgarization, crossing the
boundary between theory and practice. They formed
the core educators who produced a whole generation of
innovators in iron construction, among whom William
LeBaron Jenney and Gustave Eiffel would be the most
prominent.
Through Flachat and Perdonnet, the railway indus-
try played a critical role in the school’s development
and, although only 40% of the École centrale’s grad-
uates began their careers there (Belhoste 2004: 67),
it formed an important element in the education of
virtually all the iron constructors among them.
The reason for this is that railway construction was
the only field in which iron was used as an industri-
alized material in the first half of the 19th century.
All the other early iron structures that have been so
thoroughly researched in the history of architecture
and construction were experimental one-off structures
that had been produced in small manufacturing estab-
lishments in a proto-industrial fashion, up to and even
a little beyond the Crystal Palace of 1850.
Of the École centrale’s teachers who exerted such an
influence on the future of innovation in iron construc-
tion, it was Belanger who was able to bridge between
theory and practice in mechanics, principally by sys-
tematizing statics for technical purposes by defining
it as a special case in dynamics (personal communica-
tion from Karl-Eugen Kurrer 28/01/2019). His form of
vulgarization consisted in linking every aspect of his
theory to practical issues in the Monge tradition, which
stood in contrast to the abstract approach adopted by
his theoretical colleagues at the École polytechnique.
His students considered him to be the true creator
of engineering mechanics (Comberousse 1879: 95;
Molinos & Pronnier 1857: vi).
Belanger was a practitioner as well as a theoretician
and did not only live in the world of abstract analysis.
In a committee with Olivier and Péclet he expanded
how the curriculum communicated the concept of vul-
garization beyond his own field by defining drawing
and drafting as the language of the engineer in excru-
ciating detail (Guillet 1929: 94; Pothier 1887: 168),
647
thereby adding the visual aspect of learning into the
curriculum and following Monge, who had consid-
ered descriptive geometry a visual “language” (Picon
2000: 27).
They went further than Monge however, and
required the drawing teacher they hired, the archi-
tect Nicolas-Auguste Thumeloup, to teach drawing
as a technical course, using buildings, structures and
machinery as models rather than traditionally using the
human body. Thumeloup was also obligated to coordi-
nate and grade the students’ work in all courses rang-
ing from physiology, industrial chemistry, mechan-
ics, general physics, railway and machine design to
descriptive geometry, architecture and construction
where one would expect visual communication. The
whole program revolved around visual competence
as the “language of the engineer” (Olivier). Eiffel
is said to have bitterly complained of this stringent
requirement in a letter to his mother.
Visual learning is complex. It is multileveled and
non-linear. It enables adepts to combine information
in new ways and at multiple scales through immediate
and simultaneous visual analogy, unlike intellectual
learning through lectures and reading that depends
entirely on linear sequence and in which analogy can
only be established through ratiocination after the fact.
The effect of this concentration on visual learning was
that the students developed a multileveled spatial abil-
ity and an intellectual flexibility in conception and
design.
In the few early years in which Colladon taught
the physics of energy that he defined as prime movers
(steam engines), he supplemented the analytical and
visual learning process with a third method: tactile
learning through workshop experience as well as disas-
sembling and analyzing actual engines that he caused
to be delivered to his classroom.
This haptic learning contributed yet another level
of understanding and experiencing to the students’
education. The “feel” of a material, its weight, rel-
ative size, surface quality, heat conductivity and so
forth all contribute to technical knowledge. Although
he only taught for a very few years, the haptic tra-
dition that Colladon initiated remained an important
characteristic of the curriculum. This tri-partite, expe-
riential form of teaching: intellectual, visual and tac-
tile, distinguished the École centrale’s curriculum from
all other forms of engineering education that relied
solely on the intellectual communication of subject
matter.
All the teachers, and especially the two who had
studied in Geneva (Dumas and Colladon) were influ-
enced by the pedagogical teachings of Rousseau, and
the railway pioneer Perdonnet had also studied under
the pioneering pedagogue Pestalozzi in his youth.
The influence of pedagogues and engineers educated
in Switzerland on French engineering was substan-
tial (for the influence of Swiss Protestant thought on
engineering, see Peters 2015).
Pestalozzi stressed learning the ability to recognize
the essence of a problem (“das Wesen einer Sache”)
through “Anschauung”, observation that leads to the
creative act of “seeing”, which is the creative discovery
of the unexpected that depends on analysis of what one
observes and that lies beyond the individual limitations
of perception. In religious terms “seers” are oracles; in
science, art, technology or other activities like business
they are creators. The degree of freedom from cultural
limitation that a seer is able to attain defines the quality
and the originality of that individual’s ability to see.
This ability helped the students to cross back and forth
freely between theory and practice and constituted an
important component of the vulgarization approach
developed by the school.
Although the first years were uncertain due to the
fall of the government that removed the support of
Vatimesnil and the Ministry of Education, requiring
Lavallée to seek patronage from the Ministry of Agri-
culture and Commerce, compounded by the revolt of
1830 (“Les Trois Glorieuses”) with the abdication of
Charles X and a cholera epidemic, the concept of the
school’s educational system: tri-partite learning and
education of the ability to see through vulgarization
fulfilled a need, and the program matured quickly. One
of its characteristic criteria was that all students, what-
ever major they chose in their second year, had to take
all courses, including those that really concerned only
the other majors. The difference lay only in the exer-
cises: all students had to complete general exercises,
while those who had chosen that particular major had
additional, more detailed exercises to accomplish. This
fostered the border-crossing character of the program
and prepared the students to adapt to many different
professional situations as well as preparing them to
invent new ones.
4 INFLUENCING IRON CONSTRUCTION
As far as this applied to the new material iron, the
instructors in machine construction, a field that devel-
oped the most of any in the early years, provided
expertise in small-scale iron construction and metal-
lurgy. Perdonnet provided the conflation of the small-,
medium- and large-scale use of iron in locomotive
design, track infrastructure and station hall construc-
tion, while Mary developed a consistent design method
based on the concept that his teacher, Jean-Nicolas
Louis Durand had created for the École polytechnique
in the previous generation.
Mary translated Durand’s concept from an abstract
method of formal manipulation into a construction
and process-oriented approach that led to the mod-
ularization and industrialization of iron production
and its use in system design and construction. To
do this, Mary borrowed a great deal of visual mate-
rial from Durand and others (Nègre 2011: 3–4), but
far from merely plagiarizing it, he modified it to
suit his purpose and amalgamated Durand’s step-
by-step hierarchical development of formal design
with two of his other former teachers’ concepts at
the École des ponts et chaussées: Charles-François
648
Mandar’s detail design course in architecture (con-
struction as architecture) and Louis Bruyère’s tech-
nological approach to the use of materials as design
parameters (construction as technology) (Picon 1988:
129, 1995). He shifted Durand’s focus from “compos-
ing” formal configurations of architectural elements,
to “organizing” functional factors and unit structural
members, and thereby subtly shifted the focus of
the method from a resultant architectural form to
the dynamic design process, and thus from “art” to
“industry” (Mary 1862: 29–31 and 43–44).
Among the prominent graduates of this program,
the most active in the development of modern iron
construction were Camille Polonceau (grad. 1836) and
Henri de Dion (grad. 1851) in the early period; and Eif-
fel (grad. 1855), Jenney (grad. 1856),Armand Moisant
(grad. 1859) and Victor Contamin (grad. 1860) in
the later phase. Eiffel became a design-build contrac-
tor and Moisant a consultant contractor, and many
other graduates of those years entered the material
manufacturing and construction industries.
Two others played important roles in the transi-
tional phase from experimental iron construction to
the industrialized form of construction around 1850–
1860, a development that César Jolly, one of the largest
and most experienced French contractors of the day,
wrote about (Jolly & Joly 1863: 1–2).
The École central graduates who exemplified this
transition were Alexis Barrault (grad. 1836) and Émile
Baudet (grad. 1858). Both bridged between the tech-
nology of iron construction and the visual architectural
aspect of the new material. Barrault clearly defined
iron construction as an aesthetic statement in his devel-
opment of the visibly exposed iron structure for the
Paris Exhibition Hall of 1855 (Barrault & Bridel 1857:
2, cited by Belhoste 2004: 74 and 76), and Baudet, as
partner in the contracting firm of Leturc et Baudet,
assisted the architect Henri Labrouste’s transition from
the structurally unclear and primarily decorative use
of iron structure in the reading room at the Biblio-
thèque Sainte Geneviève in 1843–50 to the structural
use and architectural expression of the material in the
study room and the exposed stacks of the Bibliothèque
nationale 1862–68.
Labrouste had innovatively designed this last build-
ing in Mary’s sense by organizing functions, materials
and structure rather than by traditionally compos-
ing forms as was the norm in both the Beaux-Arts
and Durand traditions (Neil Levine in Bélier et al.
2012: 172). Whether or not he had been influenced
in this shift by the École centrale and its graduates is
unknown.
From the outset, the École centrale had accepted
foreign students into its innovative program. This
was another break with established French tradition.
As a result, the school’s influence was immediately
international, and by mid-century, the success of the
École centrale’s concept in establishing the connec-
tion between engineering and industry manifested in
a spate of school foundations and shifts in focus
of the already established engineering schools after
mid-century, especially in the French- and German-
speaking world.
The École des ponts et chaussées expanded its
purview to welcome foreign students and include the
civil aspect of the profession in 1851. New founda-
tions were: the École spéciale de Lausanne in 1853,
that eventually became the EPFL. It was founded by a
group that included two graduates of the École cen-
trale, Jules Marguet (grad. 1840) and Louis Rivier
(grad. 1843). The Eidgenössische Polytechnikum in
Zurich (the later ETH) followed Lausanne in 1854,
and Munich’s Polytechnische Hochschulein 1868.
Of the existing schools, the 1745 Collegium Car-
olinum became the Braunschweig Technische Uni-
versität in 1862; Karlsruhe’s 1825 Polytechnische
Schule morphed into the Polytechnische Hochschule
in 1865; Dresden’s 1828 Technische Bildungsanstalt
was transformed into the Königlich-Sächsisches Poly-
technikum in 1871; and Hanover’s 1831 Höhere
Gewerbeschule-Polytechnische Schule became the
Königliche Technische Hochschule in 1879.
5 CONCLUSIONS
The novel form of engineering education pioneered at
the École centrale in Paris was based on the pedagog-
ical concept of learning to see by means of vulgar-
ization, using intellectual, visual and haptic methods
of learning across the full spectrum of subjects. It
impacted the development of modern iron construc-
tion and the corresponding industries, helping to move
the use of the new material from an experimental to
an industrial phase. This shift critically influenced the
creation of our modern infrastructure to an extent that
remained unique in the history of construction. Its
impact was similar to the analogous border-crossing
educational system developed by Walter Gropius for
the Bauhaus at the beginning of the 20th century in
industrial and product design. Both of these systems
fostered the creative ability to see, in the Pestalozzian
sense, and led to a density of innovative activity that
has rarely been seen since.
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