Biography

 

On leaving École des Ponts as an ordinary engineer, Navier began working in the Seine Department in 1808, where from 1810 he built the timber bridge at Choisy, the Passerelle de la Cité in Paris, Pont d’Asnières and Pont d’Argenteuil.Navier was also asked by Count Molé, director-general of civil engineering, to go to Rome to rebuild the Sublicius Bridge and protect the city from flooding.However, these projects remained on the drawing board with the end of the French empire in Italy around 1813. His uncle Emiland Gauthey having left incomplete treatises on canals and bridges, Navier decided to publish them from 1809. However, it was only on his return from Italy that he completed this task.He then went on to reprint the works of Bélidor and also worked on a critical version of that author’s Hydraulic Architecture, which would be published in 1819. It was with the assignments he carried out in England between 1821 and 1823, on the condition of metalled roads, railways and their regulation, the movement of wagons on bends, the use of locomotives and the influence of slopes, as well as on suspension bridges, the subject of his dissertation in 1824, that his life would change.Indeed, he used this system to build Pont des Invalides, which gives onto the Champs-Élysées.This bridge, formed of a single arch with a span of 155 m, supported by 4 Egyptian columns, was never used, despite the monumental effect of the ingenious suspension system, because an unforeseen breach in a water pipe flooded the unfilled excavations and penetrated into the earthworks.Despite the vehement defence of the project by Prony, who proposed increasing the strength of the buttresses, nothing could change the course of events, and on September 7, 1826, the Paris Municipal Council ordered the demolition of the structure.Navier never recovered from this experience.Appointed assistant professor of applied mechanics at Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées in 1820, he received his full professorship in 1830. He would also take the position of professor of mechanical analysis left vacant at Polytechnique by Cauchy’s resignation.In 1824, the French Academy of Sciences admitted him into its mechanics section, replacing Bréguet.He was charged with the studies on the Paris to Strasbourg railway from 1833, on which he wrote several reports.He is notably famous for several essays on the equilibrium of solid elastic bodies, the mechanical action of fuels, the motion of fluids and the flow of liquid through pipes.In 1836, he died prematurely at the age of 51.

Achievements

• 1821,

  general theory of elasticity

• 1833,

  the Navier-Stokes equations, fundamental equations in fluid mechanics

Awards

• Officer of the Legion of Honour (1831)

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