Alexandre Lavalley
Alexandre-Théodore Lavalley, was an engineer and French politician. Paul Borel and Lavalley were contractors of the Suez Canal Company who designed, built, and operated the dredging machines that finished excavation of the Suez Canal from 1864 to 1869 after the use of forced labor was disallowed.
Biography
Education
Alexandre Lavalley finished his preparatory studies in Tours, entered the École Polytechnique and left after studying military engineering in 1842.He resigned his commission and spent a few years in England, where he became a mechanic and acquired practical knowledge about machinery.
Engineering career
Upon returning to France, he joined Ernest Goüin & Cie, a company that built locomotives, where he was trusted to manage the locomotive plants. He also designed lighthouses on the Black Sea, created a tunnel boring machine in Lithuania, and created a machine to dredge ports in Russia. Paul Borel and Lavalley were hired as subcontractors by the Suez Canal Company to finish the excavation of the Suez Canal. They were responsible for the design, construction, and operation of the dredging machines that finished the excavation from 1864 to 1869 after the use of corvee labor was disallowed by the Ottoman administrator of Egypt, Ismail. In 1876, he obtained a concession to work on the port of Pointe des Galets in Réunion and to build a railroad linking the port to the interior of the island.In 1881, the British railway entrepreneur Sir Edward Watkin and Lavalley were in the Anglo-French Submarine Railway Company that conducted exploratory work on both sides of the English Channel. On the English side a diameter Beaumont-English boring machine dug a pilot tunnel from Shakespeare Cliff. On the French side, a similar machine dug from Sangatte. The project was abandoned in May 1882, owing to British political and press campaigns asserting that a tunnel would compromise Britain's national defences. These early works were encountered more than a century later during the TML project.