Joseph Chaley

Joseph Chaley , also spelled Challey . (* 1795 in Ceyzérieu , Département Ain , France ; † April 15, 1861 in Tunis , Tunisia ) was a French civil engineer and pioneer in the construction of suspension bridges.

Life

Joseph Chaley joined Napoleon's honor guard at the age of 17 and took part in his unsuccessful campaigns of 1813 and 1814. After Napoleon's return from Elba , he followed him to the battle of Waterloo and was injured. During his lengthy hospital stays, he was initially interested in medicine, but soon turned to the new suspension bridges.

As an employee of Marc Seguin , he worked on his Pont de Beaucaire over the Rhone (1829) and the suspension bridge of Chazey-sur-Ain (1829).

In 1830 he moved to Freiburg im Üechtland and presented his offer for the first Zähringer bridge ( Le Grand Pont Suspendu ), with which he prevailed against the Geneva general and engineer Guillaume-Henri Dufour , who had built the Passerelle de Saint-Antoine in 1823 . From 1832 to 1834 Joseph Chaley directed the construction of the bridge, which at the time had the longest span in the world. This was followed by the Pont du Gottéron / bridge ( Gottéron bridge ) over the Galtern Gorge , the bridge from Corbières FR and the suspension bridge from Angers ( Pont de la Basse-Chaîne ). After the collapse of this bridge in 1850 with 226 fatalities, the biggest bridge disaster to date, he withdrew completely from the construction of bridges and turned to the construction of port facilities. After working on the Joliette basin in Marseille in 1848, he worked in Tunis, where he died of cholera on April 15, 1861 .

Web links

• Vie et Oeuvre de Joseph Chaley ou Challey , on art-et-histoire.com
• L'Ingénieur du Pont du Gottéron