Anghel Saligny

Anghel Saligny

Anghel Saligny (born April 19, 1854 in the village of Șerbăneşti in the municipality of Lieşti , Galați district , Moldova region ; † June 17, 1925 in Bucharest ) was a Romanian engineer , railroad and bridge builder and university professor. His most famous work was the railway bridge over the Danube near Cernavoda , which was later named after him and was one of the largest bridges in Europe at the time.

Life

Anghel Saligny's ancestors came from Châtillon-Coligny , France , but fled to the Netherlands as Huguenots after the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685 . A descendant, Alfred Rudolf Saligny , moved to Prussia , but later settled as a French teacher in Focșani in what was then the Principality of Moldova . There he founded a boarding school for elementary school students and married Maria Zarska Dobjanski, a Polish woman from northern Moldova. From the marriage came Alfons Oscar (1853-1903), later a well-known Romanian chemist, Anghel and Sofia.

Anghel Saligny was born when his family was detained in the village of Șerbăneşti for several days by violent storms. He attended his father's elementary school in Focşani and the grammar school there, then the grammar school in Potsdam. Following his interest in astronomy , he first studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin with Hermann von Helmholtz , but then from 1870 to 1874 he completed an engineering degree at the Berlin Bauakademie , one of the predecessor institutes of the Technical University of Berlin . a. with Johann Wilhelm Schwedler and Ludwig Franzius .

He began his professional activity under the direction of Georg Christoph Mehrtens on the construction of the Frankfurt an der Oder - Cottbus railway line . During this time he met Teresa Kohn, whom he married in 1876. This marriage produced three children, Eugenia, Mihail and Sofia.

In 1877 he returned to Romania to work as a project engineer until 1879 on the construction of the railway line from Ploieşti to Predeal , part of the Ploieşti – Braşov railway . Even after that, he remained connected to railway and bridge construction, for example the construction of the line from Adjud to Târgu Ocna , part of the Sfântu Gheorghe – Siculeni – Adjud railway . In Târgu Ocna he planned the train station and also the first material ropeway in Romania, which was supplied by Adolf Bleichert & Co. On it, 10 buckets each transported a ton of salt over a distance of 2100 m to the train station. The material ropeway was in operation from 1885 to 1896 when it was replaced by an industrial railway.

In 1888 and 1889 he planned and built 18 m high silos made of reinforced concrete for more than 25,000 tons of grain in Brăila and Galați , which were significantly larger than Joseph Monier's approximately simultaneous reservoir in Clamart and thus occupied a leading position in the use of reinforced concrete.

As early as 1887, Anghel Saligny was commissioned by the Romanian Railway, founded in 1880, to head the planning for the railway connection with the great Danube bridge between Cernavodă and Feteşti . In 1889 he submitted the final version of the plans for the King Carol I Bridge , which was carried out under his direction from 1890 to 1895. It was one of the largest bridges in Europe that would later bear his name.

On Anghel Saligny's proposal, the Romanian Maritime Administration was founded in 1890.

In 1895 he was appointed General Director of the Romanian Railways. In 1899 he also took over the management of the port construction administration of Constanța , where he had been involved in extensive concrete work for the expansion of the port since 1889. However, due to a financial crisis that lasted from 1899 to 1905, numerous projects had to be postponed.

In 1910, Anghel Saligny was released into retirement with great celebrations, but was by no means inactive, but began to plan flood protection on the Danube. However, the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913 and the First World War prevented his plans from being implemented. In November 1915 he was appointed head of the newly created ammunition office, which he left after 9 months due to excessive stress. For a short time between 1918 and 1919 he was also Minister for Public Works, but he abdicated in the spring so that he could devote himself entirely to his family.

Anghel Saligny held a number of other offices. Among other things, he was a founding member and later president of the Bucharest Polytechnic Society, professor at the National University of Bridges and Roads and President of the Romanian Academy .

Web links

Commons : Anghel Saligny  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

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• Liviu Buhociu, Cătălin-Adrian Buhociu: In Memoriam: Anghel Saligny (PDF; 126 kB) (Romanian)
• Iulia Băjenaru: Anghel Saligny: Omul şi Monumentul. (PDF; 539 kB) (Romanian)