Louis-Léger Vauthier (6 April 1815 – 5 October 1901) was a French engineer who designed bridges and

roadway A carriageway (British English) or roadway (North American English) is a width of road on which a vehicle is not restricted by any physical barriers or separation to move laterally. A carriageway generally consists of a number of traffic lane ...

s and was elected to the

National Assembly of France The National Assembly (, ) is the lower house of the Bicameralism, bicameral French Parliament under the French Fifth Republic, Fifth Republic, the upper house being the Senate (France), Senate (). The National Assembly's legislators are known ...

in May 1849, as a member for the

departement In the administrative divisions of France, the department (, ) is one of the three levels of government under the national level ("territorial collectivity, territorial collectivities"), between the Regions of France, administrative regions a ...

Cher Cher ( ; born Cheryl Sarkisian, May 20, 1946) is an American singer, actress and television personality. Dubbed the "Honorific nicknames in popular music, Goddess of Pop", she is known for her Androgyny, androgynous contralto voice, Music an ...

. Vauthier was born in Bergerac in the

Dordogne Dordogne ( , or ; ; ) is a large rural departments of France, department in south west France, with its Prefectures in France, prefecture in Périgueux. Located in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region roughly half-way between the Loire Valley and ...

department. Although

deported Deportation is the expulsion of a person or group of people by a state from its Sovereignty, sovereign territory. The actual definition changes depending on the place and context, and it also changes over time. A person who has been deported or ...

for his revolutionary ideas, he became a

civil engineer A civil engineer is a person who practices civil engineering – the application of planning, designing, constructing, maintaining, and operating infrastructure while protecting the public and environmental health, as well as improving existing i ...

in Spain and then Switzerland before returning to Paris in 1861. He also spent several years in

Recife Recife ( , ) is the Federative units of Brazil, state capital of Pernambuco, Brazil, on the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic coast of South America. It is the largest urban area within both the North Region, Brazil, North and the Northeast R ...

, Brazil. He is known to have proposed an early idea for a "Chemin de fer circulaire intérieur" in 1865 Metropoliain by M Passion, Office Technique Graphique,

Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris The , commonly abbreviated with the acronym BHVP, is a public library specializing in the history of the city of Paris, France. Formerly in the Hôtel Saint-Fargeau (now part of the Musée Carnavalet), when it was also known as the Bibliothèq ...

, 1988 - which would have formed an early

Paris Metro Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

. And again in 1872, 1886 and 1887 he put forward more ideas for an urban

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system in the capital. In

cartography Cartography (; from , 'papyrus, sheet of paper, map'; and , 'write') is the study and practice of making and using maps. Combining science, aesthetics and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality (or an imagined reality) can ...

, he is also credited with one of the earliest (if not the first)

thematic map A thematic map is a type of map that portrays the geographic pattern of a particular subject matter (theme) in a geographic area. This usually involves the use of map symbols to Geovisualization, visualize selected properties of geographic fe ...

to use

contour line A contour line (also isoline, isopleth, isoquant or isarithm) of a Function of several real variables, function of two variables is a curve along which the function has a constant value, so that the curve joins points of equal value. It is a ...

s to display a non-geographic variable on map--- a contour map of the population of Paris in 1874.

References

People from Bergerac, Dordogne 1815 births 1901 deaths French civil engineers Corps des ponts École Polytechnique alumni Members of the National Legislative Assembly of the French Second Republic Members of the Ligue de la patrie française {{Civil-engineering-stub