LHOMME

FRANCE (see also List of Individuals)

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29.12.1856 Clermont-Ferrand/F - 19.6.1934 Paris/F

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Albert Lhomme graduated in 1876 from Ecole Polytechnique and continued at Ecole Maritime. He started at the port of Toulon in 1878 where he was involved in the design of the coast-guard boat Caiman first, and then in the cruisers Faucon and Vautour. In all these designs boat speed was essential. From the 1890s, Lhomme took interest in armored cruisers, but his project was not accepted by the government yet. After having been promoted to chief engineer of the second class in 1890 he took over as vice-director the Indret establishment and thus collaborated with Emile Bertin (1840-1924). As a naval architect, Lhomme was thus significantly involved in boats such as Jeanne d'Arc, Henri IV or Jurien de la Gravière. These designs included definite developments and innovations which received widespread admiration. Lhomme was appointed General Engineer in 1904 and succeeded Bertin one year later as the director of the technical service of naval constructions. In 1909 he quit this service to take over the Guérigny establishment, a large mining area in the mid-east of France. His health was poor, however, such that he retired only one year later.

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Lhomme was the director of the naval hydraulics laboratory which was inaugurated in 1906 by the French minister of marine. After Newton had laid the foundations for marine engineering in the 18th century, Ferdinand Reech (1805-1880) and shortly later William Froude (1810-1879) initiated both in France and England naval hydraulic modeling. The design of the boat Greyhound by Froude was a definite success for all these undertakings, such that various laboratories for ship model testing were available by the end of the 19th century: La Spezia in Italy, Holland with a laboratory directed by Bruno Tideman (1834-1883), the English Admiralty in Haslar, Saint Petersburg in Russia for the Russian navy, the laboratories of the Norddeutscher Lloyd in Bremen, and the the Hydraulic Laboratory in Dresden-Übigau, where experiments were directed by Hubert Engels (1854-1945), the founder of the river engineering laboratories, and the Technical University of Berlin. The USA at this time had one laboratory in Washington.

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_{Lelong, R. (1935). Albert Lhomme. Bulletin de l'Association Technique Maritime et Aéronautique 39: 52-55. P}

_{Lhomme, A. (1880). L'administration de Caudebec-les-Elbeuf. Levasseur: Elbeuf.}

_{Piaud, L. (1906). Constructions navales: Le bassin d'expériences de la marine française à Paris. Le Génie Civil 49(19): 289-293.}