Aristide Berges

Laurent Arnaud Aristide Marcelin Berges was a French engineer, born September 4, 1833 in Lorp-Sentaraille, Ariege and died February 28, 1904 in Villard-Bonnot, Isere at the age of 70, who pioneered high-head hydroelectric power in the French Alps and coined the term that became French shorthand for it. Trained as an engineer at the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris, graduating in 1852, he patented a hydraulic wood defibrator for papermaking in 1864 and in 1869 installed a wood-grinding mill at Lancey fed by a 200-meter forced water conduit dropping from a mountain lake, a record height for such an installation at the time. In 1882, expanding the mill's capacity to roughly 1,200 horsepower with a 480-meter drop, he attached a Gramme dynamo to his turbines to generate electric current, and went on to build a dam system at Crozet Lake between 1884 and 1892 and two further 500-meter conduits between 1891 and 1896. At the 1889 Paris Exposition he compared the energy locked in mountain glaciers and snowmelt to that of coal, coining the phrase houille blanche, white coal, which became the standard French term for hydroelectric power, and he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor that same year; his Lancey paper mills grew into a major regional industrial concern producing about 100,000 tons of paper annually, and his son Maurice later built the region's first 60-kilovolt high-tension power line in 1909.