Biography

 

Joining Polytechnique in 1910, he left it amongst the top of his class and chose Ponts et Chaussées.After the First World War, where he worked in aviation and won the Legion of Honour, in 1920 he was appointed to the Brest Harbour maritime department, where he met Caquot and Freyssinet, designer of the Plougastel Bridge, where he was in charge of construction.This gave him the opportunity to implement several of his inventions, in particular ladder support walls, which have their facings anchored in the structure they support, and the use of vibrating wires to monitor structural stresses.When, in 1928, he was appointed chief engineer at the Haute Dordogne infrastructure department, it was the starting point of a brilliant career in large dam building.With the Marèges Dam (1930-1935), he revived the technique of arch dam construction in France, and experimented with ski jump overflow systems, which project water powerfully away from the foot of the dam, preventing erosion to the foundations.Coyne also invented acoustic monitoring processes and the system of anchoring structures with steel straps running vertically over the structure, sealed into the ground at the bottom, which maintain powerful prestress pressure on the structure.This technique was first applied in 1931 on the Cheurfas Dam in Algeria.Other arch dams in France include Saint-Etienne-Cantalès, l’Aigle, Bort, Chastang, Tignes, then dams with multiple arches employing an even more advanced technique – Grandval and Roselend and, in Zimbabwe, the Kariba Dam.In all, over his career, he built some one hundred dams around the world, a quarter of them abroad.Acknowledged as the undisputed master in this field, he was put in charge of the large dams course at École des Ponts et Chaussées.Nationally, his career was recompensed in 1935 by the position of head of the large dams technical department and, internationally, in 1946 by the presidency of the International Commission on Large Dams, a post he held until 1952. In addition, in 1953 he received the Architecture Grand Prix for his lifetime achievement in the design and construction of large dams.In 1947 he retired from public service to found his engineering design office, Coyne & Bellier.He designed the Malpasset Dam (Var), built in 1954, which cracked on December 2 1959, generating a wave 40 metres high (equivalent to 50,000,000 m³ of water) and devastated 3200 hectares, killed 423 people.Although André Coyne’s design calculations were not the cause of this disaster, it profoundly affected him, and he died 6 months later.

 

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