Louis Favre

Who was Louis Favre?

Louis Favre was a Swiss engineer, remembered as the builder of the Gotthard Rail Tunnel between 1872 and his death in the tunnel in 1879.

He was born the son of a carpenter at Chêne, a small village some 3 kilometers from Geneva. At eighteen, he left to tour France and developed a career undertaking the design and direction of civil engineering works. He was not well schooled, but studied the principal bases of such sciences as were to be useful to him, and took evening classes to make up for what was lacking in his early instruction; not that he hoped to make a complete study for an engineer, but only to learn the indispensable. He was, according to a colleague "before all things, a practical man, who made up for the enforced insufficiency of his technical knowledge by a coup d'œil of surprising accuracy".

In 1872 he was invited to build a tunnel through the Gotthard massif, connecting Switzerland to the Italian border. The project was, for the time, a vast undertaking, verging on folly according to many critics.