Guillaume Ritter’s hydraulic power station of the 1860s breathed new life into the Fribourg region. Animation by Klaas Kaat. Swiss Federal Office of Energy

The bold ambitions of engineer Guillaume Ritter

In the late 1860s, the rural canton of Fribourg was staking everything on industrialisation. Guillaume Ritter, a young engineer from Neuchâtel with bold plans for revolutionary ‘long-distance mechanical power transmission’ therefore came along at just the right moment.

Thomas Weibel

Thomas Weibel is a journalist and professor emeritus of media engineering.

Ritter already had a glittering reputation. He had a diploma from Paris’s École centrale des arts et manufactures, and a prodigious project portfolio, which included building Neuchâtel’s new water supply system in 1865 at the tender age of 30, and the one in Avignon four years later. And the still young man had even more ambitious plans for Fribourg.

In the 1860s, Fribourg was not a prosperous city. The main goods traded were livestock, cheese and wood. The economy was dominated by agriculture, with straw plaiting workshops, tanneries and mills dotted about. Most of the population was poverty-stricken, and the number of households reliant on poor relief funds was growing all the time. As the prefect of the Sense district wrote in a report in 1864, there were fears that riots could break out. A reader’s letter published in the newspaper Le Confédéré on 9 October 1867 even warned about “a great danger if the problem of widespread poverty among the working classes [was] allowed to fester for much longer.” The canton was pinning its hopes on modern industrial companies, with the railways powering industrialisation. The cantonal authorities therefore started building the first railway line in 1856, and the Bern-Lausanne line that passed through Fribourg opened in 1862.

**The city of Fribourg in the 1870s, photographed by Adolphe Braun.** Swiss National Museum

With his visionary – some even said grandiose – plans, the young Guillaume Ritter wanted to turn Fribourg into a thriving hub. Firstly, he proposed building a dam above Maigrauge Abbey and making the Sarine into a lake. Pumps driven by turbines were to feed filtered water into a reservoir in the Guintzet district, 150 metres higher up. His idea was that this would help supply Fribourg with drinking water – something which very few towns in the Swiss Plateau were able to do at the time. And that wasn’t all: the power from the Sarine River dammed in the newly formed Lac de Pérolles reservoir would not only pump water, but would also supply energy to a whole industrial zone.

The central location of the medieval city of Fribourg seemed ideally suited to Ritter’s lofty plans, which included building huge grain warehouses and making the city a key trading centre for the European flour trade. He dreamed of building a holiday resort on the bank of the new reservoir, including a restaurant, a music pavilion, a casino catering to 50,000 tourists a year, and a railway to travel the 13 kilometres to the summit of La Berra at 1,719 metres altitude.

The Lac de Pérolles, with the sawmill of the Société générale des Eaux et Forêts in the background, between 1885 and 1900. — **The Lac de Pérolles, with the sawmill of the *Société générale des Eaux et Forêts* in the background, between 1885 and 1900.** Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Fribourg

In terms of energy to drive the machinery of the factories that would settle there, Ritter intended to use mechanical power; Switzerland’s first electrical installation – to illuminate the Hotel Engadiner Kulm in St. Moritz – would not be built until 1879. Ritter therefore proposed a bold system, which he called ‘long-distance mechanical power transmission’. The power station by the dam was designed to transmit the hydraulic energy through a system of turbines, gear mechanisms and steel cables to the Pérolles plateau, 80 metres higher up – a bit like a ski lift, but on an even bigger scale.

**This is how Guillaume Ritter envisioned ‘long-distance mechanical power transmission’ from the reservoir to the Pérolles plateau.** Sentiers de l'eau

After moving to Fribourg in 1869, Ritter set up the General Water and Forestry Company (Société générale des Eaux et Forêts) and bought up the forest located between Pérolles and the reservoir. Ritter also planned to build a large sawmill on the Pérolles plateau. The facility was to be a showpiece for the new industrial zone – and above all it was to help finance the mammoth project.

**The power generated with the cables was used by various industrial companies on the Pérolles plateau.** Groupe E

Modesty was not Ritter’s strong point. When presenting the project to Fribourg’s cantonal parliament, a politician called out to him: “Mais vous ne connaissez pas la Sarine, la Sarine est un torrent!” (“But you don’t know the Sarine River, it’s a torrent!”). To which the young Ritter retorted: “Peut-être, mais la Sarine non plus ne me connaît pas!” (“Perhaps, but the Sarine doesn’t know me either!”). The project was approved and the building work for the 10-metre-high Sarine dam began in 1870. But difficulties were indeed inevitable: in the first year alone, there were 15 flash floods, which held up the construction work. At the same time, the mighty columns had to be built for the rollers over which Ritter’s steel cables were to run, and in one place a tunnel even had to be carved through the sandstone rocks. In February 1873, the Sarine was finally dammed, and the new Lac de Pérolles started to be filled.

**Guillaume Ritter thought big, planned big, and achieved great things. Photo of the young engineer from Neuchâtel.** Wikimini Stock

Against all odds, Guillaume Ritter had made his bold plan a reality. In March 1874, the imposing construction transmitted 1,000 units of mechanical horsepower up to the Pérolles plateau for the first time. New companies did indeed quickly locate there, in a short time, creating 800 new industrial jobs. Economically, however, things were not going according to plan. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71, global economic crises and construction delays led to problems for Ritter’s General Water and Forestry Company. In July 1875, the company filed for bankruptcy, and Ritter was dismissed from the Board of Directors. A liquidation committee completed the final works, and the power transmission by cable was retained. After 12 more kilometres of pipelines were laid, the water supply network was finally finished in 1878.

During the liquidation of Ritter’s company, the city and Canton of Fribourg found themselves at loggerheads. The cantonal authorities wanted to prevent the new industrial facilities in the Pérolles district being handed over to the city. They negotiated in secret and ultimately bought up the General Water and Forestry Company. As the new owner, the Fribourg Cantonal Council decided to dismantle the steel cables and pillars and instead to use the Pérolles power station to produce electricity. Ritter’s erstwhile company became the Freiburgischen Elektrizitätswerken, which eventually gave rise to the modern-day Groupe E in 2006.

**View of the dam at the Freiburg-Maigrauge hydropower plant, 1921.** e-pics

Little of Guillaume Ritter’s revolutionary construction can still be seen today. The foundations of the former pillars still stand proud, and a footpath passes through the cable tunnels between the water reservoir and the Pérolles district. Display boards remind us of the audacious engineer whose ingenuity far outweighed his business sense. Probably his most daring plan – to supply the city of Paris with drinking water from Lake Neuchâtel through a 37-kilometre-long tunnel under the Jura mountains followed by a 470-kilometre-long pipeline – remained a pipe dream. Ritter died in 1912 in his birthplace, Neuchâtel.

Vestiges of the past: the foundations and cable galleries of Guillaume Ritter’s former construction.

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