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III

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Not only in secondary education but still more so in higher education the Revolutionary Convention had created a new type of institution which was to become permanently established and a model imitated by the whole world: the Ecole polytechnique . The wars of the Revolution and the help which some of the scientists had been able to render in the production of essential supplies11.20 had led to a new appreciation of the need of trained engineers, in the first instance for military purposes. But industrial advance also created a new interest in machines. Scientific and technological progress created a widespread enthusiasm for technological studies, which expressed itself in the foundation of such societies as the Association philotechnique and the Société polytechnique11.21 Higher technical education had till then been confined to specialized schools such as the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussés and the various military schools. It was at one of the latter that G. Monge, the founder of descriptive geometry, minister of marine during the Revolution and later friend of Napoleon, taught. He sponsored the idea of a single great school in which all classes of engineers should receive their training in the subjects they had in common.11.22 He communicated that idea to Lazare Carnot, the ``organizer of victory,'' his old pupil and himself no mean physicist and engineer.11.23 These two men impressed their stamp on the new institution which was created in 1794. The new Ecole polytechnique was (against the advice of Laplace)11.24 to be devoted mainly to the applied sciences --in contrast to the Ecole normale, created at the same time and devoted to theory--and remained so during the first ten or twenty years of its existence. The whole teaching centered, to a much higher degree than is still true of similar institutions, around Monge's subject, descriptive geometry, or the art of blueprint making, as we may call it to show its special significance for engineers.11.25 First organized on essentially civilian lines, the school was later given a purely military organization by Napoleon who also, however much he favored it otherwise, resisted any attempt to liberalize its curriculum, and conceded even the provision of a course in so harmless a subject as literature only with reluctance.11.26

Yet in spite of the limitations as to the subjects taught, and the even more serious limitations of the previous education of the students in its early years, the Ecole commanded from the very beginning a teaching staff probably more illustrious than any other institution in Europe has had before or since. Lagrange was among its first professors, and although Laplace was not a regular teacher there, he was connected with the school in many ways, including the office of chairman of its council. Monge, Fourier, Prony, and Poinsot were among the first generation of teachers of mathematical and physical subjects; Berthollet, who continued the work of Lavoisier, and several others hardly less distinguished,11.27 taught chemistry. The second generation, which began to take over early in the new century, included such names as Poisson, Ampére, Gay-Lussac, Thénard, Arago, Cauchy, Fresnel, Malus, to mention only the best known--and incidentally, nearly all ex-students of the Ecole. The institution had existed for only a few years when it became famous all over Europe, and the first interval of peace in 1801-02 brought Volta, Count Rumford, and Alexander von Humboldt11.28on pilgrimage to the new temple of science.


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