Louis-Antoine Beaunier

Louis-Antoine Beaunier (born January 15, 1779 in Melun , † August 26, 1835 in Paris ) was the founder and first director of the École nationale supérieure des mines de Saint-Étienne and the first concessionaire of a French railway line.

Youth and education

Louis-Antoine Beaunier was born as the first son of the notary and high official Antoine Beaunier. His brother Firmin-Hippolyte (1782–1824), who was three years his junior, devoted himself to the fine arts . One of his most famous works is the painting "Duguesclin recevant des envoyes de Charles V , l'epée de connetable" and hangs in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes .

Louis-Antoine enrolled at the Parisian college École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris in 1794 at the age of 16, eleven years after the institute was founded. There were 40 students in the semester. He graduated on March 9, 1795. He then made two extensive educational trips, in 1796 with Jean Baptist Duhamel to the Pyrenees and Languedoc , and the following year with Déodat Gratet de Dolomieu to the Italian Alps and the Alpes-de department -Haute-Provence .

job

Even during his studies, his exceptional skills in the field of metallurgy were noticed. He entered the civil service. In 1809 at the latest he was a mark separator and assistant to Duhamel for the mines on the Saar , later his successor as director of the mining school École practique des Mines de la Sarre in Geislautern . During their joint service they created an extensive set of maps of the coal seams between Geislautern and the mining town of Neunkirchen . This so-called Duhamel Atlas , the completion of which was reported to Paris on April 5, 1810, bears witness to the high quality of the French mining school in Paris and thus also in Geislautern. For over 100 years, the Duhamel Atlas has been the basis for all mining-concessional questions on the Saar.

In 1984 a memorial plaque was unveiled on the site of the former Geislautern mining school, which keeps the merits of these two men alive.

Unrest triggered by the Napoleonic Wars of 1814/1815 prompted Beaunier to leave the Saar area. Until 1824 he worked on determining the mining rights in the Loire department, and later also on the Rhône and the Gard. At the same time he continued his metallurgical studies. The main focus for him was the problem of cementation . He also carried out experiments on the production of melt steels.

In 1820 he traveled to England to inspect the railway construction that was beginning there . The concession for the first French, initially 23 kilometers long railway line Saint-Étienne – Andrézieux near Lyon was for Louis-Antoine Beaunier. This enabled him to have coal transported between the Saint-Étienne mine and the inland port in Andrézieux on the Loire from August 1827 .

In 1830 he founded the Mining Academy in Saint-Étienne and became its first director. In the same year he was appointed to the Supreme Administrative Court ( Conseil d'État ). He was inspector general of the mining authority when he died in Paris in 1835.

literature

• Annales des mines, 1835, pp. 515–540 (French)

swell

Prof.-Dr.-Ing. Hubertus Rolshoven (Institut Régional Intracommunautaire) et al .: The cut. 40th year, issue 1–2, Saarbrücken, 1988

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.arteantica.eu/artisti/beaunier-firmin-hippolyte_00045984.html  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Source: French Ministry of Culture