A Cyclopaedia of Canadian Biography: Being Chiefly Men of the Time. Various
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and they have five sons and one daughter living, and have buried three children, the last, an exceedingly promising youth, in his sixteenth year.
Baillairgé, Chevalier Chas. P. F., M.S., Quebec. The subject of this who is a Chevalier of the Order of St. Sauveur de Monte Reale, Italy, was born in September, 1827, and for the past forty years has been practising his profession as an engineer, architect and surveyor, in the city of Quebec. Since 1856 he has been a member of the Board of Examiners of Land Surveyors for the province, and since 1875 its chairman; he is an honorary member of the Society for the Generalization of Education in France; and has been the recipient of thirteen medals of honour and of seventeen diplomas, etc., from learned societies and public bodies in France, Belgium, Italy, Russia, Japan, etc. Mr. Baillairgé’s father, who died in 1865, at the age of sixty-eight, was born in Quebec, and for over thirty years was road surveyor of that city. His mother, Charlotte Janverin Horsley, who is still living, was born in the Isle of Wight, England, and was a daughter of Lieutenant Horsley, R.N. His grandfather on the paternal side, P. Florent Baillairgé, is of French descent, and was connected, now nearly a century ago, with the restoration of the Basilica, Quebec. The wife of the latter was Cureux de St. Germain, also of French descent. Our subject married, in 1845, Euphémie, daughter of Mr. Jean Duval, and step-daughter of the Hon. John Duval, for many years chief justice of Lower Canada, by whom he had eleven children, four of whom only survive. His wife dying in February, 1878, he, in April of the following year, married Anne, eldest daughter of Captain Benjamin Wilson, of the British navy, by whom he has two sons and a daughter. Mr. Baillairgé was educated at the Seminary of Quebec, but, finding the curriculum of studies too lengthy, he left that institution some time before the termination of the full course of ten years, and entered into a joint apprenticeship as architect, engineer and surveyor. During this apprenticeship he devoted himself to mathematical and natural science studies, and received diplomas for his proficiency in 1848, when only twenty-one years of age. At that period he entered upon his profession, and for the last twenty years has filled the post of city engineer of Quebec, manager of its water works, engineer of its new water works under the Beemer contract of 1883; engineer, on the part of the city, in and over the North Shore, Piles and Lake St. John railways during their construction. Mr. Baillairgé has held successive commissions in the militia, as ensign, lieutenant, and captain; and in 1860, and for several years thereafter, was hydrographic surveyor to the Quebec Board of Harbour Commissioners. In 1861 he was elected vice-president of the Association of Architects and Civil Engineers of Canada. In 1858 he was elected, and again in 1861 unanimously re-elected, to represent the St. Louis ward in the City Council, Quebec. In 1863 he was called for two years to Ottawa, to act as joint architect of the Parliament and Departmental buildings then in course of erection. Interests of considerable magnitude were then at stake between the government and the contractors, claims amounting to nearly half a million of money having to be adjusted. In connection with his employment by the government, Mr. Baillairgé found that to continue his services he must be a party to some sacrifice of principle, which, rather than consent to, he was indiscreet enough to tell the authorities of the time. This excess of virtue was too moral for the appointing power and more than it was disposed to brook in an employé of the government. The difficulty was, therefore, got over by giving Mr. Baillairgé his feuille de route, a compliment to his integrity of which he has ever since been justly proud. He shortly afterwards returned to Quebec. During his professional career, Mr. Baillairgé designed and erected numerous private residences in and around Quebec, as well as many public buildings, including the Asylum and the Church of the Sisters of Charity, the Laval University building, the new Gaol, Music Hall, several churches, both in the city and in the adjoining parishes—that of Ste. Marie, Beauce, being much admired on account of the beauty and regularity of its interior. The “Monument des Braves de 1760” was erected in 1860, on the Ste. Foye road, after a design by him and under his superintendence. The government, the clergy and others have often availed themselves of his services in arbitration on knotty questions of technology, disputed boundaries, builders’ claims, surveys and reports on various subjects. In 1872, Mr. Baillairgé suggested, and in 1878 designed and carried out what is now known as the Dufferin Terrace, Quebec, a structure some 1,500 feet in length, overlooking the St. Lawrence from a height of 182 feet, and built along the face of the cliff under the Citadel. This terrace was inaugurated in 1878 by their Excellencies the Marquis of Lorne and H.R.H. the Princess Louise, who pronounced it a splendid achievement. In 1873 Mr. Baillairgé designed and built the aqueduct bridge over the St. Charles river, the peculiarity about which is that the structure forms an arch as does the aqueduct pipe it encloses, whereby, in case of the destruction of the surrounding wood-work by fire, the pipe being self-supporting, the city may not be deprived of water while re-constructing the frost-protecting tunnel enclosure. At the age of seventeen the subject of our sketch built a double cylindered steam carriage for traffic on ordinary roads. From 1848 to 1865 he delivered a series of lectures, in the old Parliament buildings and elsewhere, on astronomy, light, steam and the steam engine, pneumatics, acoustics, geometry, the atmosphere, and other kindred subjects, under the patronage of the Canadian and other institutes; and in 1872, in the rooms of the Literary and Historical Society, Quebec, under the auspices of that institution, he delivered an exhaustive lecture on geometry, mensuration, and the stereometricon (a mode of cubing all solids by one and the same rule, thus reducing the study and labour of a year to that of a day or an hour), which he had then but recently invented, and for which he was made honorary member of several learned societies, and received the numerous medals and diplomas already alluded to. The following letter from the Ministry of Public Instruction, Russia, is worthy of insertion as explanatory of the advantages of the stereometricon:
Department of Public Instruction,
St. Petersburg, Feb. 14th, 1877.
To M. Baillairgé, architect, Quebec,
Sir—The Committee on Science of the Department of Public Instruction (of Russia) recognizing the unquestionable usefulness of your “Tableau Stéréométrique,” for the teaching of geometry in general, as well as its practical application to other sciences, is particularly pleased to add its unrestricted approbation to the testimony of the savants of Europe and America, by informing you that the above “Tableau,” with all its appliances, will be recommended in the primary and middle schools, in order to complete the cabinets and mathematical collections, and inscribed in the catalogues of works approved of by the Department of Public Instruction. Accept, sir, the assurance of my high consideration.
E. de Bradker,
Chief of the Department of Public Instruction.
And the Quebec Mercury of the 10th July, 1878, has the following in relation to a second letter from the same source: “It will be remembered that in February, 1877, Mr. Baillairgé received an official letter from the Minister of Public Instruction, of St. Petersburg, Russia, informing him that his new system of mensuration had been adopted in all the primary and medium schools of that vast empire. After a lapse of eighteen months, the system having been found to work well, Mr. Baillairgé has received an additional testimonial from the same source, informing him that the system is to be applied in all the polytechnic schools of the Russian empire.” Mr. Baillairgé has since that time given occasional lectures in both languages on industrial art and design, and on other interesting and instructive topics, and is now engaged on a dictionary or dictionaries of the consonances of both the French and English languages. In 1866 he wrote his treatise on geometry and trigonometry, plane and spherical, with mathematical tables—a volume of some 900 pages octavo, and has since edited several works and pamphlets on like subjects. In his work on geometry, which, by the way, is written in the French language, Mr. Baillairgé has, by a process explained in the preface, reduced to fully half their number the two hundred and odd propositions of the first six books of Euclid, while deducing and retaining all the conclusions arrived at by the great geometer. Mr. Baillairgé, moreover, shows the practical use and adaptation of problems and theorems which might otherwise appear to be of doubtful utility, as of the ratio between the tangent, whole secant, and part of the secant without the circle, in the laying out of railroad and other curves running through given points, and numerous other examples. His treatment of spherics and of the affections of the sides and angles is, in many respects, novel, and more easy of apprehension by the general student. In a note at foot of page 330, Mr. Baillairgé shows the fallacy of Thorpe’s pretended