The wars of the previous times had emptied the coffers of the states. Even the United Kingdom, which had the lead in industrialisation, was in debt because of the English money, that is the gold, given to the continental enemies of Napoleon I. In Europe, " Asia started at the Landstrasse (eastern exit of Vienna) ", as Klemens Wenzel Lothar prince of Metternich-Winnenburg (1773 - 1859) meant. The roads which existed were in an appalling state.

Therefore, the first steps taken were those that didn't cost much. In France an order dating from July 1814 instituted a Corps Royal and the Ecole royale des Ponts et Chausséees (Royal School for Civil Engineering) for royal roads. In 1830 the adjective " royal " was replaced by " national ". After the Vienna Congress (1814 - 1815), the kingdom had only ninety-six departments left, which reduced the number of engineers. There were five hundred and thirty-seven engineers of the Ponts et Chaussées in 1804 and only four hundred and twenty-six in 1815. In 1816, the contractor roadmenders were replaced by static roadmenders, who now were permanent workers of the State.

Thanks to a long period of peace, international trade was improving again. The notables: important landowners and factory owners (the number of steam engines increased from two hundred in 1815 to five hundred and twenty-five in 1832), asked for the development of infrastructures, which the prosperity made possible. In 1820, it was decided that the canals should constitute a network. At the end of the Empire, 1.200 km were open to ships. In 1820, a schedule was set to complete the building of 2.800 km and to get the network to 10.000 km. Damaged roads were repaired and the many destroyed bridges were rebuilt. Those works were partly financed through loans secured on tolls and partly through the Treasury. In 1835, the tax on salt, instituted in 1806, yielded fifty-six million francs and twenty-two of it was actually used to build and maintain royal roads. Travelling from Paris to Lyon, which lasted four or five days in 1816, took only two days in 1848 and thirty-three hours with the mail-coach that went by day and by night. It was the same to travel from Paris to Bordeaux, which lasted two days instead of six.

Ephemeral Ministries of Public Works were created in 1830 and 1831; but the one from 1836 was to last until 1940. In 1841, a law about expropriation for reasons of public interest was promulgated. In 1848, the administration of the Ponts et Chausées had six hundred and eighty-six engineers, more than three thousand works foremen and around fifteen thousand roadmenders. The same year, the Ateliers nationaux (National Workshops) existed briefly, but they were hardly used for public works.

There were a lot of political changes during the 19th century and, in 1871, the French territory got smaller. Despite the payment of a war indemnity to the German Empire and the financial difficulties resulting from the crash of the Union Génerale (1882) which succeeded the crash of the Stock Exchange in Vienna, public works made great strides, but they especially focused on railways.

8.1 -Bridges

In France, at the beginning of that period, the following bridges were finished: in 1819 in Bordeaux and Sèvres; in 1824 in Souillac; in 1825 in Agen, Moissac and Montrejean; in 1826 in Pensaguel; in 1827 in Aiguillon, La Roche-de-Glun and Petit-Vey; in 1829 in Laval… A suspension bridge with chains of articulated bars and a 137 metre wide span, was erected in Berwick in England in 1820. That kind of bridge could have a much wider span than stone bridges or bridges with a wooden frame and they cost less, which explains their quick development. After a study trip by Claude-Louis-Marie-Henri Navier (1785 - 1836) to the United Kingdom in 1822 and thanks to the improvement of the metallurgy of crucible steel, the nephew of the Montgolfier brothers, Marc Seguin (1786 - 1875), built a cable bridge over the Rhône between Tain and Tournon, with two 85 metre long spans, in 1825. This technology was used for many bridges: one hundred and thirty between 1831 and 1846 on French royal (national) and departmental roads, while there were only twenty with important stone or wood works. We can mention the bridges of the Grève (now of Arcole, 1828) and Saint-Louis (1836) in Paris, the one over the defile of the Durance in Mirabeau (1847), as well as the one in Fribourg (with a 200 metre wide span, 1837). In 1850, the bridge of the Basse-Chaîne over the Maine in Angers, which had been set in motion by the wind, got in resonance because of the moving of a battalion of soldiers clashing with the swaying of the deck. The bridge collapsed and two hundred and twenty-six people died.

The building of railways required many bridges and gave rise to innovations. In 1845, a bridge out of lamellar iron was constructed. From 1846 to 1850, the son of George Stephenson, Robert (1803 - 1859) erected a metal bridge with tubular girders whose two central spans were each 140 metres long: it was the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait which separated the Isle of Anglesey from Wales. From 1855 on, steel was mass-produced. The converter of Sir Henry Bessemer (1813 - 1898) produced one ton in 1858 and ten tons a few years later. In 1864, a silica refractory furnace was invented by Emile Martin (1794 - 1871) and his son Pierre (1824 - 1915). It produced twenty and later sixty tons at the same time. At last in 1878, dolomite refractory furnaces were devised by the cousins Sidney Gilchrist Thomas (1850 - 1885) and Percy Carlyle Gilchrist (1851 - 1935). They enabled the process of phosphorous ore. That's why, in the United Kingdom, the production of cast iron went from one million and four hundred thousand tons in 1840 to three million and nine thousand tons in 1860 and reached nearly eight millions in 1880. Therefore the prices became lower, so that this material was used for bridge piers. The family firm of Alfred Krupp (1812 - 1887) became one of the most powerful steel works in the world. It produced the steel guns, which enabled Prussia to win the Battle of Sadowa (1866). The Maria Pia Bridge built in Oporto in 1878 (the central angle of its arch was 160 metres wide), the Garabit Viaduct (1882 - 1889) and the Tower (1887 - 1889) designed by Gustave Eiffel (1832 - 1923) were built in puddled iron, though. As steel was reasonably priced, many bridges were built, such as the bridge over the Mississippi in Saint-Louis (1874), the Brooklyn Bridge in New York (five thousand metres long, 1887), the Tower Bridge in London (1886 - 1894), and, in Scotland, a bridge with two 520 metre wide spans which required fifty thousand tons of metal was built over the Firth of Forth in 1890.

Steel also enabled the building of movable bridges. In 1871, Leroyer built a platform which was guided by under water rails lying twelve metres deep and drawn by a fixed steam engine at the harbour entrance of Saint-Malo. De Palacio built the ferry bridge in the outer harbour of Bilbao in 1893, which had a 164 metre wide span and a headroom of 4 metres. The same kind of bridges were built in Matrou over the Charente (1897), in Bizerte, Rouen, Nantes, Marseille… But lifting, bascule, swing or rolling bridges were also built. Metal structures were usually jointed with rivets which could weigh up to twenty per cent of the metal used. In 1895, Henry Le Chatelier (1850 - 1836) devised the oxyacetylene blowpipe for autogenous steel soldering. In 1901, this enabled him to lighten structures and to simplify their forms, so that it was profitable to cover them with anti-corrosive paint.

Another material which was used to build bridges, amongst others, dates from those times. Louis-Joseph Vicat (1786 - 1861), who was in charge of erecting the bridge of Souillac over the Dordogne in 1812, tried to obtain an artificial pozzolana for its foundation. In 1818, he obtained a slaked lime and used it. He carried on with his research until 1846 and defined the production rules for cement. The studying of its setting was the object of Le Chatelier's doctoral thesis in 1887, where he also showed the importance of high-alumina cements. But before these chemical reactions were even known, cement enabled the making of concrete, an artificial rock which could be moulded. So as to make up for its weak tensile strength, Joseph Lambot invented reinforced concrete in 1848 to build a boat used on the Lac du Bourget. Joseph Monier (1823 - 1906) rediscovered that technique to build the plant tubs in the Orangery of Versailles in 1869. In 1867, Jean-François Coignet (1814 - 1888) invented prefabrication. He erected a building in Paris with precast concrete panels. In 1898, Charles Rabut (1852 - 1925) and, in 1899, François-Benjamin-Joseph Hennebique (1842 - 1921) used this material for bridges. Hennebique built the Camille Dehogues bridge in Châtellerault and the one of the Risorgimento in Rome (with a 100 metre wide span).


8.2 - Roads

In 1824, the numbering of royal roads was reconsidered: 14,000 km were in a good state, as much had to be repaired and 3,000 km had to be completed. Most of them were radial roads and their centre point was Paris: they connected the capital city to the seaports or the biggest towns. This network was progressively improved, amongst others by reducing the gradient of steep roads, substituting sudden sags by culverts and ending up cross-country links, for instance from Lyon to Bordeaux through Corrèze, from Agde to Toulouse, from Albi to Spain… In the United Kingdom, John London Mac Adam (1758 - 1836) devised the road construction with small broken stone compacted by road rollers. As he came back from his mission (cf. supra), Navier brought back this technique to France and Antoine-Rémi Polonceau (1778 - 1847) used it: the French verb " macadamiser " dates from 1828. In 1833, 24,000 km were maintained, 6,000 km had to be repaired and nearly 5,000 km were deficient. In 1834, there were more than fifteen hundred relays. A law from 1837 allocated sixty million francs for improvements which consisted in suppressing deficiencies and reducing gradients (from 8.5% to 5 % on the Montry Hill between Paris and Vitry-le-François for instance). In 1845, thirty-six and forty-one million francs were respectively allocated for those two kinds of works. Strategic roads were built in the western departments and the road which was to be called " voie Napoleon " in 1913, was finished in 1845.

From 1835 on, in the open country, direction indicators were fixed two and a half metres above the roads at intersections. In 1845, the traffic on national roads was first registered. This has been carried out regularly since then. In the same year, the maximum weight of vehicles and the minimum breadth of tyres were regulated. But thanks to the improvement of the pavement's quality, the transportation costs diminished and, in 1851, road traffic was free again. The rows of trees, one million six hundred thousand trees in 1860, reached nearly three million trees at the end of the century.

Under Napoleon III (1808 - 1873), the thermal road of the Pyrenees was built, and also nearly 400 kilometres of new roads in Corsica. The road going through the Lautaret Pass was finished in 1862 and the one of the Sompsort Pass in1863.

The competition from railways (cf. infra) brought about a diminution of road traffic. Some relays had to close down and, after the war against Germany (1870 and 1871), there were no longer important road investment projects.

The departemental roads, financed by the local councils, were developed so as to have a decent meshing of the network. There were 48,000 kilometres of them in 1871. At this time thirty million francs were spent for their maintenance. They were constructed with good technical characteristics. After the catastrophe in Bouzet, the Chamber of Deputies voted a project to hand over national roads to the departments, but it was refused by the Senate.

The alignment of many local roads existed since the Gallo-Roman times. These roads were more or less maintained by the local (civil or religious) authorities and were generally in a very bad state at the beginning of the 19th century. In 1824, a law gave the communes (smallest territorial division in French administration, equivalent to a British parish) the choice of paying a tax or giving an allowance in kind for their maintenance. In 1836, a law distinguished local roads with important traffic, which were under the authority of the prefects, and ordinary local roads, which municipal councils were in charge of. Those were allowed to use an allowance in kind (no more than three days a year). In the event of a financial deficiency, the prefect could impose a tax for works. A law from 1868 set the expenses of the following ten years at one hundred million francs. In fact, at the end of the Second Empire, there were three hundred thousand kilometres of roads and all localities were disenclosed. In regions with a quick economical expansion such as the North and the West, towns stretched along the roads.

This road network expanded until a competitor was born - the railway. Its networks were created at the same time in most of the industrialised countries. In other regions, railways preceded important roads. Therefore it is necessary that we should now make a rough sketch of the appearance of this new rival to roads.


8.3 The birth of a new rival to roads

Most of the innovations which made railways possible dated from the preceding periods (cf. supra). In 1823, George Stephenson and his son Robert (1803 - 1859) created the first factory producing locomotives. They could draw eighty tons at a speed of twenty-four kilometres an hour. The first train, conveying coal and travellers, went on the sixty kilometre-long iron railway line from Stockton to Darlington in north-east England in 1825. This means of transportation expanded quickly in the United Kingdom, where there certainly were six thousand and four hundred kilometres of canals, but which were narrow. From 1826 to 1830, the Liverpool-Manchester line was built. In 1827, an eighteen kilometre-long railway with tunnels was constructed to convey coal from the coal basin of Saint-Etienne to the Loire. The means of haulage was horses, stationary steam engines and gravity. In 1830, there were Stephenson locomotives which Seguin modified in 1831: he equipped them with tubular boilers. In 1832, the railway line went up to Lyon.

This new means of transportation by land had an original feature: for one determined road, there was only one operator who generally owned simultaneously the infrastructure and the vehicles which were all driven and maintained by the company's employees. After the first trials, the expansion was very quick in many regions despite the many difficulties there were to solve at the same time. There were technical matters: rail supports, railway switches, axle-boxes, supply of water and fuel, signs (" The moment you can see it, it's already too late "), railway stations which should allow mass-transportation… There were problems of regulations about running, stations, trains, employees, tariffing… There were also political ones: who should finance the works? which lines should be built first? ...

In Belgium, which was officially independent in 1831, the building of railways started in 1834 with the twenty-two kilometre-long Brussels-Malines line. In 1835, the railway line from Nürnberg to Fürth was constructed; from 1835 to 1837, the one from Paris to Saint-Germain-en-Laye (actually Le Pecq); in 1839, the ones from Dresden to Leipzig, from Paris to Versailles, from Amsterdam to Haarlem and from Naples to Portici. There were sixteen hundred kilometres of railway lines in the United Kingdom in 1836, five hundred in the German countries in 1840 and five hundred and fifty in France in 1841. Regular mail transport by rail existed in the Midlands from 1838.

Railways couldn't be built on steep slopes. Therefore, they required many bridges and tunnels and important earthworks. In France, railway lines were concessions granted by the State for a limited time. The latter partly financed and supervised the works and running. In 1838, a railway department was created in the general council of the Ponts et Chaussées. This means of transportation stimulated the development of iron metallurgy (cf. supra): in 1833, all rails were made out of iron (in 1885, iron was to be replaced by steel, which was allowed in France after a decree in 1872); this enabled speeds of sixty kilometres an hour while the carried load increased.

Despite the accident in Meudon on the 8 May 1842, on the 11 June 1842, a law was promulgated which planned seven railway lines starting from Paris (the Legrand Star) and going to Belgium, Strasbourg, Marseilles and Cette (Sète), Bourges, Bayonne, Nantes and on the Channel, which was yet to be determined It also planned two other lines: Lyon-Mulhouse and Bordeaux-Marseilles. The companies paid for the construction of this network and the State paid for the buying of ground and for earthworks, engineering structures and railway stations. In return, the central authorities set a time limit on concessions, running conditions and tariffs. In 1843, the lines from Paris to Orleans and to Rouen were opened. The latter was built with British supervisors and British material. In 1846, the Paris-Lille line was built and in 1852, the one from Paris to Strasbourg. The line from Paris to Lyon, started in 1847, was completed in 1856. So as to organise the whole three thousand kilometres in which there were many isolated sections, the laws of 1852 created networks such as the Lyon-Mediteranee or the Paris-Orleans. A new reorganisation in 1859 led to the constitution of six homogeneous networks.

In 1838, Samuel F.B. Morse (1791 - 1872) gave an open demonstration his electric telegraph. Its code enabled the transmission of twenty-five words a minute. In 1844, a telegraphic line was built between Boston and Baltimore. This invention made rail traffic control much easier; the Paris-Rouen railway was equipped with it in 1845. [An under-sea telegraphic cable hab been laid in 1850 by John W. Brett (1805 - 1863) between Dover and Calais. The first transatlantic cable has been put in service in 1858]

Railways soon had several consequences. In 1845, the State bought the canal shares to reduce the tariffs and to permit them to be competitive. Railway transportation was so cheap that coal could now be used in areas lying far away from mines and that made mass-production possible. As a consequence, there was a quick industrialisation and urbanisation in some parts of the territory such as the region of Saint-Etienne or the North. It also brought about mass-tourism: the first "excursion train" went from Paris to Dieppe in 1848. The companies created relief and pension funds and co-operatives where workers participated in management. Underground networks (the first one, built in London from 1860 to 1864, had steam engines until 1887) so that the suburban lines of London, Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, New York, Chicago, Boston (which reached further than one league) enabled big metropolises to extend. During the Crimean War (1854 - 1856), the railway proved to be superior for the conveyance of troops, despite the missing line between Lyon and Valence. In 1856, the connection between Paris and Marseilles was opened and used to bring the soldiers back from Sebastopol. As Napoleon III intervened in Italy on behalf of the Piemontese against the Habsburg Empire in 1859, the railway enabled the conveyance of more than two hundred and twenty thousand men and thirty-six thousand horses in three months, which was six times as quick as with roads. Indeed, railway wagons could carry up to ten tons while road vehicles could only carry two or three tons. Rail was also used for the mobilisation for the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 (two hundred and twenty thousand men, thirty thousand horses and three thousand guns on the French part; and four hundred and twenty thousand men and fifteen thousand guns on the Prussian part) and also for the moving of the Loire army commanded by Charles-Denis-Sauter Bourbaki (1828 - 1923) towards the East. What made these performances possible was the allocation of more than seven per cent of the French gross national product for railway investments.

Once the war indemnity fixed by the Frankfurt Treaty (1871) was paid, new railways were built. The State's network was constituted in 1878 with the employees of the concerned companies but they didn't become civil servants. In 1879, a programme of the minister of Public Works Charles-Louis de Saulces de Freycinet (1828 - 1823) planned to finish the network by building sixteen thousand kilometres of new railway, forty thousand kilometres of lines of local interest (which had been made official by a law in 1865). In this plan, funds for roads came only to three per cent of the amount allocated for railways and waterways. Until the end of the century, there was indeed not much traffic on national roads (relays were closed down). As for departmental and local roads, which totalled six hundred thousand kilometres, they were essentially tributaries of canals and railways. Fourteen million travellers and sixteen million tons per kilometre circulated on them in 1900. The goal was to be able to serve every county town. The running of rail network led to the institution of one standard time in France - Paris Time; (which was to be replaced by Greenwich Mean Time in 1911).


8.4 - Simultaneous development of road and railway networks

The railway was born in only a few States of Western Europe but it spread very quickly in other independent States and in the colonies;

8.4.1 - In other independent States

In the German countries, from 1850 on, during the Zwinschenreich, there was an important industrial rise, especially in chemistry and in metallurgy where modern techniques were applied. At that time, there were six thousand kilometres of railways. Despite the important emigration to the United States of America, the birth rate was so high that the population increased, especially in the big cities. The several Zollverein (in Prussia in 1816 and 1823, in a good part of Germany in 1828 and 1833 and finally in all Germany in 1865) and the creation of the Second Reich in 1871 favoured the development of transport. This development essentially concerned waterways (accommodation of rivers and canals) and railway. The latter constituted a twenty thousand kilometre-wide standardised network, but which wasn't centralised as in France. In 1879, Werner von Siemens (1816 - 1892) created electric traction. For a short distance transport in a Berlin exhibition, he used electric power transmission between two spinning engines through a metal cable. This had been invented by Hippolyte Fontaine (1832 - 1910) in 1873. In 1900, the German Empire was the fourth commercial power, coming after the United Kingdom, France and the United States of America. It had a railway network of fifty thousand kilometres, but its road network was not much developed.

Though the chronology changes, the situation was quite the same in Central Europe. The line connecting Vienna and Wagram was established in 1838, but the Emperors Franz II (1768 - 1835) and, from 1835 until 1848, Ferdinant I (1793 - 1875) rejected any innovation. Only after the Revolution of 1848 was there an administrative centralisation and a railway network radiating from two centres, Vienna and Budapest, was built. In 1855, these railways were sold to a company whose capital was mainly French. In 1867, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was created and that polyethnical State developed its industry. The same year, a railway was built on the nearly fourteen hundred metre high Brenner Pass. Twenty-seven tunnels and many viaducts were constructed. Once the railway was built, there was almost no more road traffic at this pass. From 1822 to 1825, the road of the Arlberg Pass was rebuilt and stagecoaches took it every week. From 1880 to 1884, a railway was constructed there. It reached a height of thirteen hundred metres and went through a ten kilometre long tunnel. From 1848 to 1853, the Vienna-Trieste line was built. It was the first time that a railway went through the Alps, at the nearly one thousand metre high Semmering Pass. Around 1882, one thousand kilometres of railway was built each year. After the crash of the Union Générale (cf. supra), French companies were replaced by German ones. In 1883, the Orient Express Train, with carriages belonging to the International Sleeping Car Company, (Wagon-lits) crossed seven countries from Paris to Bucharest. It covered two thousand eight hundred kilometres in seventy-five hours .

Russia kept expanding in the Caucasus and in Asia. In 1837, a railway going from Saint Petersburg to Tsarkoïé Selo was built, in 1851, one from Saint Petersburg to Moscow and, between 1856 and 1861, from Saint Petersburg to Varsovia. But it was difficult to find stones for the railways' carriageway and ballast for a large part of the territory of seventeen million square metres and only seventy million inhabitants. Therefore networks were quite loose and in a very bad state. After the administrative reform in 1864, the zemstva were in charge of road maintenance. These were local councils which were elected with a suffrage based on property qualification and social order: the aristocracy had three quarters of the seats. In 1891, the Trans-Siberian Railway was started and was completed in 1902. It was nine thousand kilometres long, and went from Moscow to Vladivostok serving a region where roads were bad or didn't even exist. At the end of the century, rails, wagons and almost all locomotives were produced in the Empire.

The Industrial Revolution didn't occur in Portugal until the 19th century. There weren't enough resources to transform the mediocre road network until the second half of the century. Then, three thousand kilometres of roads were built between 1859 and 1875 at the same time as three thousand kilometres of railways between 1856 and 1912.

The United States of America expanded towards the West and the South. In 1823, a slight rise in customs duties permitted the State to build canals and roads towards the West, amongst others was the pioneer road going up to Saint Louis. In 1830 a twenty-four kilometre long line was built from Baltimore to Elliot's Mill. The wooden rails were covered with metal and carried horse-drawn trains. In 1831, a railway which was equipped with Stephenson locomotives was built in Philadelphia. With the immigration, the population doubled every twenty years, the territory expanded and new states were created. In 1850, railways went further than Chicago in the West and there were fourteen thousand kilometres of them. During the Civil War (1861 - 1865), opposing twenty-four northern States to eleven Confederate States, most of the military transport was by rail. In 1869, the first five thousand kilometre long transcontinental connection was finished: it went up to San Francisco. There were six of them at the end of the century. In the Middle West, roads going from the east to the west or from the north to the south connected to them.

In Brazil, which was effectively independent in 1808 and legitimately in 1822, rivers were used to reach the inland. The development of coffee plantations and cattle breeding led to the creation of railways so as to reduce the transportation costs: carrying everything on mules was quite expensive. Fifty-seven lines were constructed from 1853 to 1885 to penetrate the country. Now agriculture was intensified near these structures. The produce was brought to the stations on ox-carts.

Argentina had been discovered in 1509 by Juan Diaz de Solis as he was searching the South Seas and it had become a Colony of the Spanish Crown. The dismemberment of the Spanish colonial Empire in the 19th century was followed by a time of political disturbances. The constitution of 1853 instituted a federal state. From 1860 on, there was a lot of foreign capital and one third of it was used to build railways for exports (especially wool and hides). In 1914, a thirty-four thousand kilometre wide network converged on Buenos Aires.

In Peru, which had become independent in 1826, a commuter railway was built in 1868: starting in the port of Callao, it went up into the Andes and reached four thousand eight hundred metres (it is still the highest railway in the world).

In Japan, there wasn't any renewal of land transport until the beginning of the Meiji era (1868). The first railway, from Tokyo to Yokohama, dates from 1872. It was especially expanded through the occupation of the south of Manchuria after the war against China (1895). After it had defeated Russia in 1905, Japan got the Russian rights to the South-Manchurian railway.

In China, the centralised mandarin organisation couldn't cope with the population increase (three thousand million at the beginning of the 19th century). The economy was ruined by the importation of manufactured goods and opium, which was supported by the interventions of modern navies on coasts and rivers. Ports were granted to foreign powers. In 1896, the imperial government was obliged to accept financial loans with high interest rates to open railway lines allowing access to the inland: Russian ones in Manchuria, German ones in Shantung, British ones in the Yangtse and French ones in three provinces of the south-east.

In the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire lost its territories for the benefit of the Russian and the Habsburg Empires, France, the United Kingdom (Cyprus), as well as new independent States: Greece (1830), Serbia and Romania (1878). It was an outlet to sell manufactured goods and a source of raw material. The State only survived financially thanks to the advances of the Ottoman Bank, a Franco-British company which was created in 1863 and collected the Empire's revenues. British, French and German companies were granted concessions to build roads and railways, among them was the one Baghdad (which still remains uncompleted).


8.4.2 - In French colonies

In 1815, there remained only scattered pieces of the first French colonial empire. The liquidation of the Bacri debt led to the expedition of Algiers (Al Djazair) in 1830 and to the conquest of Algeria (1830 - 1857), Bacri being a merchant of Algiers who had sold his wheat to the Directoire in whose business the Bey Husayn al-Husayn (1765 - 1838) had a financial interest. In this country, there had been Phoenician trading posts in ports, then Carthaginian ones, and later Roman ways. The latter had disappeared after the invasions of the Vandals (429 - 455), of the Arabians (647 - 911) and the Ottoman domination (since the 16th century). Under the Second (French) Empire, the construction of roads and railways was undertaken. From 1865 to1875, the lines from Algiers to Oran (Ouahran) and from Philippeville (Skikda) to Constantine (Qacentina) were built, that is more than five hundred kilometres.

The first roads in Senegal date from that time too. This country had been reached by Portuguese navigators in 1444. After their trading posts had been held by the Dutch, the French had founded the city of Saint Louis in 1638, where slave trading took place It had become British after the European Seven Years' War (1756 - 1763), but became French again after the Versailles Treaty (1783). Louis Faidherbe (1818 - 1889) was appointed governor in 1854. In 1857, he founded Dakar, founded the native Senegalese infantry which enabled him to conquer the inland and he also promoted the cultivation of the peanut, coming from America. The first railway was built in 1885.

New Caledonia was annexed in 1853 and a few roads were laid out for the exploitation of nickel, which started in 1877.

The conquest of Indo-China took a long time (from 1858 until 1896): eastern Cochin China and Cambodia in 1863, all Cochin China in 1867, and Tonkin from 1873 to 1896. The first railway was built in Cambodia in 1885. Important roads were not to be opened before the 20th century.

The same goes for French central Africa, which was granted to France at the Conference of Berlin (1885), where the colonial powers shared the colonial world amongst themselves.

Tunisia had been successively Phoenician, Carthaginian, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Arabian, Aghlabid, Fatimid, Zirid, Almohad, Afsid and Ottoman, as a consequence there had been an antiquated road network to connect Roman cities. In the 19th century, the prices of exported agricultural and artisanal products came down, the Bey reinforced his army (1837), had a telegraphic network (1857) built and a railway network started. He financed all with French loans. In 1869, the State was under Anglo-Franco-Italian financial supervision. This part of the Ottoman Empire was finally granted to France: in 1881, after a military intervention, the protectorate was established. The rail network by then was one hundred and ninety-one kilometres in extent.

In Madagascar, the French Resident was appointed in 1885, the protectorate was instituted in 1895 and the annexation executed in 1896; but the conquest was only completed in 1908.


8.4.3 - In the other colonies

In the 19th century, the industrialisation of the United Kingdom couldn't absorb the demographic increase (the population went from ten to twenty-seven million between 1800 and 1831). That's why many people emigrated to the colonies, particularly to Canada, where canals and, in 1836, the first railway were laid out. The latter was twenty-six kilometres long. The five Canadian provinces federated in 1867. In 1876, the twelve hundred kilometre long Intercolonial Railway was completed. From 1873 to 1885, the only west-east line of communication , the four thousand six hundred kilometre long Canadian Pacific Railway going from Montreal to Vancouver, was constructed. The network was now thirty-four thousand kilometres wide. Then, secondary railway lines were created in agricultural regions, without any competition from roads.

The coasts of India had had commercial contact with China and the Moslem world during the Middle Ages. Since Vasco de Gama (1469 - 1524) had reached Calcutta (Kozhicode) in 1498, had occupied Goa in 1510 he had become (in 1523) viceroy of the Portuguese Indies, which actually only consisted of a few trading posts. At the beginning of the 17th century, the Dutch replaced the Portuguese. In 1652, after the Anglo-Dutch war, those were replaced by agents of the East India Company. The French Compagnie des Indes, created in 1664, founded Pondicherry in 1673 appointed Joseph-François marquis de Dupleix (1697 - 1763) governor general in 1742. He instituted a protectorate in the major part of Dekkan. According to the Treaty of Paris, France could only keep five trading posts. The East India Company progressively extended its territory despite a defeat in Afghanistan (1842). It occupied Burma (1826 - 1852), Sind (1843), Cashmere (1846), Punjab (1849), instituted a protectorate in Baluchistan (1876) and imposed a trusteeship on the Afghan sovereign (1880). The company developed tea, coffee, and indigo plantations… But the government in London progressively took over the control. From 1848 to 1856, the public works, telegraph and railway were organised: the first railway line was constructed between Bombay and Thana in 1853. The company was suppressed in 1858 and the Queen became Empress of India in 1877. For military and economic use, roads as well as railways, which sometimes required exceptional engineering structures, were built with British capital. The railway line from Silinguri to Darjeeling for instance was eighty kilometres long and had a difference in level of more than two thousand metres). The network was to extend to sixty thousand kilometres in 1914.

The coast of South Africa had been reached by the Portuguese navigators Diego Cão in 1485, Bartolomeu Dias (1450 - 1500) in 1488 and Vasco de Gama in 1497. The Vereeinigde Oostindische had founded a small colony in Capetown in 1652: it was delimited by a ditch in 1658. In 1688, Dutch cultivators had spread in a fifty kilometre wide ray. In 1760, they went over the Orange river. Once the company was dissolved (cf. supra), the United Kingdom assured its " protection " to the colony in 1871. This was made official by the convention of London in 1814. British emigration and the transfer of Indian workers led to a territorial spreading: Natal was annexed in 1843. The discovery of diamonds in the area of Kimberley in 1867 led to its annexation into the Colony in 1871. The Boers (descendants of European pioneers in the Dutch period) were pushed towards the north and the east (Grand Trek) and created the Republic of the Orange Free State in 1836 and the South African Republic (The Transvaal) in 1856. Paul Kruger (1805 - 1904), the president of Transvaal from 1883 to 1902, made certain of a line of communication with the exterior without going though the British territory by a building a rail link going from Johannesburg to Maputo in the Portuguese Mozambique. The discovery of gold in The Transvaal in 1884 brought about the Anglo-Boer war (1899 - 1902). Only after the political unification following that war was a road network to be built.

James Cook (1728 - 1779) took possession of Australia in 1770. From 1788 to 1850, one hundred thousand prisoners were sent there. The British immigration settled on the Southeast coast from 1830 onwards. There were more than one million inhabitants in 1870. There were practically no waterways to penetrate this huge area. The discovery of gold in 1851 and the development of breeding to provide wool and frozen meat from 1880 on, led to road construction. Especially to the beginning of a railway network in the Southeast (the first line in the Queensland was in 1865) and a penetration line from Port Augusta to Oodnadatta. In total fifteen thousand kilometres in 1890, though with three different width gauges.

New Zealand had been discovered by the Dutch navigator Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603 - 1659) in 1642 and came under British control in 1840. The wars against the Maoris lasted until 1870 and, until the end of the century, the colonies were only coastal and quite scattered.

From 1823 to 1831 sources of tropical products had been localised in the territory of today's Nigeria through exploration. Great Britain annexed Lagos in 1861 and got the protectorate of Lower Niger at the Berlin Conference. This territory was quickly extended. But the Colony was not created until 1914.

The first African railway was built in 1856 between Cairo and Alexandria. In 1858, Ferdinand-Marie Vicomte de Lesseps (1805 - 1894) created the Universal Company of the Suez Ship Canal that conducted the works from 1859 to 1869. In 1860, the British government tried to hinder the opening of a new "route to India" and persuaded the Sublime Porte (The Sublime Porte was the name of the Turkish government) to abolish the "Pharaonic statute of labour". De Lesseps had shovels and steam dredgers designed and constructed in Europe. In 1863, Isma'il (1830 - 1895) became Pasha and the Sublime Porte entitled him Khedive in 1867. He had road bridges, railways and telegraph lines built. Financing it all with foreign loans. In 1874, his debts were so high that he had to sell Egypt's shares of the Universal Company to Great Britain, which thus acquired a majority holding. In 1882, the British army occupied Egypt and from then on the British controlled the public works department.

In 1886, an Anglo-German convention granted the territories of Uganda and of today's Kenya (that name dates only from 1920) to the United Kingdom. The penetration of these territories began in 1892 as Punjabi coolies constructed a railway going from Mombassa to the Lake Victoria.

The British occupied the Indian Archipelago in 1810 and gave it back to the Netherlands in 1824. From 1830 onwards, plantations were reorganised and hevea was cultivated from 1877 on. In 1860, tin and, in1886, petroleum began to be exploited. Coastal navigation was important and land transportation was developed to penetrate the interior

The poor financial resources of Portugal (cf. supra) explain the weak development of Angola. This territory had been discovered in the 15th century and it constituted a source of slaves for Brazil until 1850. The agricultural utilisation of the interior began in 1875 as compulsory labour was instituted.

Mozambique, the coast of which had been colonised since 1505, also served as a source of slaves for Brazil. Later on, the railway enabled the penetration of the interior.

The Belgian King, Leopold II (1835 - 1909), obtained the Congo Basin at the Berlin Conference thanks to his diplomacy. This territory became his personal fief in 1885. It Became a Belgian colony in 1908. An inland waterway network of twelve thousand kilometres was navigable by forty-ton barges. A railway, constructed between 1889 and 1898, connected this network with the sea. In 1890, the exploitation of latex started and the abundance of Katanga's mineral resources was established in 1892. Railways going towards Angola, Zambia, and in 1911, towards South Africa were used to export these products.


8.5 - Some more innovations

Other innovations, which were or were subsequently related to roads and their use, need to be mentioned.
Gas lighting (cf. supra) was used in Paris at the Place Vendôme in 1825 and in the Rue de la Paix in 1829. In the same city, gas stoves were installed in 1840. The important cities of industrialised countries were progressively equipped with gasworks.

Purchasing, teaching and spreading of technical knowledge developed. Polytechnic schools were created: Vienna in 1816, Karlsruhe and Warsaw in 1825, Munich and Dresden in 1829, Hanover in 1831, Stuttgart in 1839… From 1831 on, the Ponts et Chaussées published its Annals. The Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris had a laboratory in 1831.

An example of standardisation was the pitch of threads in 1841, named after the inventor of a screw cutting and feed-shaft lathe, Sir Joseph Whitworth (1803 - 1887). The International Metric Conference took place in 1875, the international Weights and Measures Department was created to standardise lengths and masses.

Amongst other international organisations of the 19th century, some are worth mentioning, e.g. the International Rhine Commission, created at the Vienna Congress in 1815. There were also bilateral agreements on railways in 1847. The navigation of the Danube dates from 1856. The International Convention on Telegraph took place in 1863 and the European Conference on railway schedules in 1872.

Germain Sommeiller's (1815 - 1871) percussion drill in 1858 and Alfred Nobel's (1833 - 1896) dynamite in 1867 made quarry extracting and earthworks easier.

The Alsatian industrialists created the Association des propriétaires d'Appareils à Vapeur (APAVE - an association of steam engine owners) in order to inspect the engines and to prevent accidents. It operated not only in Alsace, but also in Würtemberg and Switzerland. Associations of that kind were created in the North (1873), Normandy (1874), Paris region (1876), Nantes (1878), Bordeaux (1879) and Marseilles (1885).

In 1890 blast furnace slag was added to cement to improve its quality.

Aerostation (cf. supra) led to the invention of the airship by Pierre-Célestin Arnauld (died 1869) in 1851. In 1873, Spiess took out a patent for his rigid airship. which was constructed in 1900 by Ferdinand Count von Zeppelin (1818 - 1917). The balloon was one means of transportation used during the siege of Paris in 1870 and 1871, but only free balloon. In 1890, Clement Adler (1841 - 1925) flew aircraft with steam engines that were heavier than the ai, they moved: the Eole in 1890 and the Avion in 1897.

In 1735, the Pechelbronn deposit was exploited to produce oil through distillation for lamps; it yielded a few litres a day. In 1813, there was the first auger boring and in 1857 the first oil refinery. In 1859, still for the same purpose, Edwin Laurentine Drake (1819 - 1880) bore a shaft in Pennsylvania. The Standard Oil Company was founded in 1882. Tanker wagons operated between Bakou and Batoum in 1894. Replacing animal or vegetable lubricants with petroleum oil enabled higher temperatures to be reached, which permitted Wilhelm Schmidt (1858 - 1924) to build superheated steam engines with a better energy output in 1898. In 1900, some locomotives were capable of drawing four hundred tons at one hundred and twenty kilometres an hour.

Thomas Alva Edison (1847 - 1931) invented an electric lamp that could be of real use: the carbon-filament lamp. It was used in the streets of New York in 1882.

Alexander Graham Bell (1847 - 1922) gave a demonstration of his telephone in 1875. His invention was improved in 1877 by David Edward Hughes (1831 - 1900) and in 1879, the installation of a telephone network started in Paris.

So as to confirm the electromagnetic theory of James-Clerk Maxwell (1831 - 1879), Heinrich Hertz (1857 - 1894) devised a source and a detector of electromagnetic waves in 1888. Edouard Branly (1844 - 1940) built a more sensitive detector in 1890. In 1895, Aleksandr Stepanovitch Popov (1859 - 1906) invented the antenna. Guglielmo Marconi (1874 - 1937) devised the first public wireless transmission of signals. In 1898, he could send a signal thirty kilometres away and, in 1903, from Cape Cod, Newfoundland to England. He was Nobel Prize winner for his work in 1909.

The 1:80,000 map of France, also called an ordnance survey map, was started in 1818 and was completed with Corsica in 1882; it it remained in use until 1958.

The Aztecs used rubber to make balls, waterproof boots and flasks. In the 18th century in Europe, people made erasers and waterproof silk for hydrogen inflated balloons out of it. Pierre-Joseph Macquer (1718 - 1784) invented rubber tubing: he coated wax moulds with a solution in oil of turpentine. In 1823, Charles Mac Intosh took out a patent for a waterproof textile. In 1839, Charles Goodyear (1800 - 1860) devised vulcanisation by heating rubber with sulphur. In 1888, John Boyd Dunlop (1840 - 1921) took out a patent for a bicycle valve tyre. In 1891, the two brothers Edouard (1859 - 1940) and André (1853 - 1931) Michelin created a removable tyre. Rubber latex gathering was intensified in equatorial forests and later, hevea was cultivated in big plantations.

Another innovation of the 19th century is of great importance for the subject we are dealing with: the rise of a new kind of road vehicle.


8.6 - The emergence of the motor car

In the 19th century, there were further attempts to create self-propelled steam cars such as Cugnot's (cf. supra) and Trevithick's (cf. supra) and, in was the case of Julius Griffith, steam stagecoaches in 1821. But at that time, roads were unsuitable for heavy road vehicles. These could have been quite fast, if the regulations hadn't limited the speed of such engines, e.g. the Locomotive Acts in the United Kingdom: limited the maximum speed to six kilometres an hour in the countryside and three in town. In France, where there were no such regulations, Amédée Bollée (1844 - 1917) attempted to construct passenger vehicles. They had room for twelve passengers, weighed five tons and could run at a speed of forty kilometres an hour; in 1872; there was room for sixteen passengers at a speed of forty-two kilometres an hour in 1876 and a speed of sixty kilometres an hour was obtained in 1881 . But experience showed that this means of transport was not capable of further development.

People tried to find small engines for domestic use and in 1843, Eugenio Barsanti (1821 - 1864) invented an internal-combustion engine. It was supplied with a mixture of town gas and air, which was ignited by a spark supplied with by an Alessandro Volta battery. In 1859, Etienne Lenoir (1822 - 1900) built an engine using a coil invented by Heinrich Daniel Ruhmkorff (1803 - 1877) in 1851 for the ignition. The thermodynamic works of Sadi Carnot (1796 - 1832), the son of Lazare Carnot, inspired Alphonse Beau de Rochas (1815 - 1893) who invented the four-stroke engine in 1862. The latter was constructed in 1876 by Nikolaus Otto (1832 - 1891). Siemens' dynamo, dating from 1865, could be used to energise Ruhmkorff coils. From 1872 to 1876, George B. Brayton worked on inventing an oil carburettor. In 1884, Edouard Delamarre-Debouteville and, in 1889, Albert marquis de Dion (1856 - 1946) constructed petrol engines. That kind of engine was used for a completely different purpose from the one that had spurred on the Researches. They were mounted on a tricycle by Carl Benz (1844 - 1919) in 1886 and also on cars from 1887 by Armand Peugeot (1849 - 1915), in 1889 by Gottlieb Daimler (1834 - 1900), in 1891 by Emile Levassor (1843 - 1897) and René Panhard (1841 - 1907) and in 1899 by Louis Renault (1877 - 1945). Races were organised: Paris/Rouen in 1894, Paris/Bordeaux/Paris in 1895, and Paris/Marseilles in 1896. Pneumatic tyres were fittrd on motor cars from 1895. In 1897, Rudolph Diesel (1858 - 1913) devised the pre-ignition and injection motor. The first Motor Show took place in Paris in 1898. But at that time, motoring was seen only as a sport, or a whim, of some rich eccentrics. Suitable roads for that kind of vehicle were not to be available until the next century.


Contents - Next