The Frenchman Jules Dupuit is considered a precursor of logistics in the economy. His theoretical and practical achievements were not limited to logistics, but also encompassed transport engineering, hydrology, and economics.
Engineering career
Jules Dupuit was born on May 18, 1804, in Fossano, Italy. When he was 10 years old, his family moved to France. He completed his secondary education in Versailles, winning an award in physics. In 1824, he was admitted to the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ENPC) in Paris. After graduating, he obtained an engineering degree and began working in the Sarthe Department, dealing with road and navigation issues in increasingly senior positions. In 1829, he married, and in 1836, he attained the rank of first-class engineer. He conducted research and published several significant theoretical and practical works concerning the wear and maintenance of roads. For his professional achievements, the association of engineers awarded Dupuit a gold medal, and in May 1843, he was awarded the Legion of Honour.
The floods of the Loire in 1844 and 1846 turned Dupuit’s interest toward the theoretical and practical issues of river flooding and solutions for flood prevention. In 1850, he took the position of director and chief engineer of the municipal water supply and supervised the construction of the sewer system in Paris. In December 1855, Dupuit became Inspector General of the Corps of Engineers; he was also a member of the General Council of Roads and Bridges. At that time, Dupuit was one of the most prominent engineers in France. He died on September 5, 1866, in Paris.
Economic achievements
The Polytechnic (ENPC), since its founding in 1747, gradually fostered a tradition among its lecturers and graduates of interest in the economic evaluation of public works. One of these graduates was Dupuit, who focused on the analysis of social benefits from goods subject to public production, such as drinking water, roads, canals, and bridges. Between 1844 and 1853, Dupuit published a series of articles on measuring the social benefits of public goods and services. In these articles, he formulated the distinction between the significance of total utility and marginal utility in relation to demand prices. In subsequent articles, he moved on to consider the factors underlying monopoly prices. He was one of the precursors of the marginalist approach, which enabled the application of mathematics to the study of economic phenomena.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 3/2009.