Bearer bond of 1000 francs at 5% interest, issued in Paris in 1930.

Head office: 76 rue Lecourbe.

A graduate engineer from the Ecole Centrale in the same promotion as Gustave Eiffel, Félix Léon Edoux is known for having designed a hydraulic lift, which he baptized “elevator” in 1867.

A public works contractor in Paris, it was by observing the first major Haussmann construction sites that he imagined a hydraulic load lift, for which he filed a patent in 1864. The construction of buildings of five to seven floors involves an increasingly efficient water distribution system: taking advantage of the high water pressure, Edoux imagines channeling it through a lifting system located at the top of the building.

The first two “elevators” with hydraulic elevation and for civil use were presented at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1867. In 1884, Eiffel ordered from Edoux the elevator which was to connect the second floor to the top of the future Eiffel Tower, and which would operate until 1983.

Subsequently, Edoux will be one of the first in France to build electric lifts on the model imagined by the German manufacturer Siemens AG. Edoux opens its own construction workshops in Vaugirard, rue de Sèvres (future rue Lecourbe).

The Edoux company merged in 1912 with that of Pierre Samain, taking the name of Edoux-Samain. The new company will employ 700 people in the workshops on rue Lecourbe and in the annex on rue Saint-Amand, for another 50 years. The workshops will be decommissioned in 1941.