Louis Armand

Louis Armand was a French engineer and senior civil servant, born in 1905 in Cruseilles in Haute-Savoie and died in 1971, who managed public companies and played a notable part in the Second World War. He graduated second in his class from the Ecole Polytechnique and joined the Corps des Mines. Working for the Paris to Lyon and Mediterranean railway and then the national railway company SNCF, he invented in 1940 and 1941 a water treatment process for steam locomotive boilers that prevents scale from furring them up, known as the Traitement Integral Armand. In 1943 he organised the resistance group Resistance-Fer; the Gestapo arrested him in June 1944 and he was freed during the liberation of Paris. He became general manager of SNCF in 1949, pressed for railway electrification with alternating current, led the Armand Commission and in 1958 became the first president of Euratom. He was elected to the Academie Francaise in 1963.