This book sets out to uncover the origins of the idea of a European electricity network. It explores historically the roots of a transnational European system, showing how engineers came to think in terms of ‘Europe’ already in the 1920s, and how these ideas continued to influence network-building in later decades. This thinking not only corresponded to economic and technical attributes of the system, as first described by Thomas Hughes. This thesis claims that a European system was also legitimised by ideological motives, as a complement to – but not always complying with – economic and technical efficiency.

Covering the period between 1918 and 2001 the book provides a detailed analysis of ideas on, and the building of, a European electricity system. By doing so, this thesis makes two original contributions. First, based on extensive archival research, it makes a substantial contribution to the much-neglected history of international collaboration in Europe. Prevailing histories of electricity infrastructures mainly focus on national developments. Second, drawing on a wide variety of historiographical insights, it places this history in the broader historical context of the twentieth century, paying ample attention to the influence of both hot and cold wars, and interwar developments. By combining the specific history of this international collaboration with a more general political and economic history of the twentieth century, Lagendijk explains why a European solution emerged. The thesis primarily focuses on Western European developments and explains how this network took its specific shape through the building of different regional powerpools among national systems. In addition, the thesis presents a contribution to the emerging field of transnational history by focusing on the work and activities of international organisations, without neglecting the power and influence of nation-states.

The book starts by revealing how an international community of electricity entrepreneurs and electrical engineers had existed since the turn of the century. Yet at the same time, national legislations came to limit the extent of international network development and operation. Whereas the first objections to these limita tions were general, they became intertwined with the European movement over the course of the 1920s.

A dry winter following a hot summer in 1921-‘22 led to a lack of water, which seriously decreased hydroelectricity production in Italy. In the Po Valley, in the northern part of the country, this forced local governments to take action. The provinces of Piedmont, Lombardy, and Venice – Italy's industrial heartland – appointed special commissioners to ration the available electricity to industry. Besides this rationing, Switzerland supplied extra electricity. Technically this was possible, as transmission lines crossed the Italian-Swiss border and Italy already imported electricity from Switzerland. Electricity suppliers in France took part as well. French coal-fired plants in Nancy and Vincey supplied electricity to Zurich, Switzerland. The latter town normally received electricity from the Swiss plants in Brusio and Thusis. Northern Italy now consumed that electricity. According to the commissioner for Lombardy, Milanese engineer Angelo Omedeo, these electricity transmissions avoided “consequent shutting down of factories owing to lack of motive power”.

At this point in time an international solution – electricity exchanges between countries – seemed obvious to a solve a local problem – electricity shortage in northern Italy. Why this was possible, and how this situation was still rather unique needs historical explanation. By 1921 transmission lines traversed national boundaries for over two decades. The earliest cross-border interconnections, mostly 60-70 kV lines, could not play an important role beyond the local level, however. Often these connections transmitted electricity produced by power plants situated on border rivers.

But after the Great War, two major developments took place. A first major change was the use of higher voltages for transmission lines. This enabled the transfer of electricity over longer distances, without uneconomical losses in charge (see Table 2.1). Since then, higher voltage transmission lines interconnected the border regions between Germany, Switzerland, France, and to a lesser extent Italy. According to Lundgreen, the use of “high-voltage electrical technology opened the doors to a revolution in machine building, […] lighting and transportation, […] to the production, storage and distribution of current via central power stations”. Second and related, the average power plant capacity increased with the construction of so-called supercentrales or Überlandwerke. At the time the rapid increase in capacity resonated in consecutive claims of several new plants to be the largest in Europe. As the name Überlandwerk already implies, these plants served consumers far beyond the local.

The research for this book developed after I noticed something remarkable. It started as a sequence of observations that gradually expanded into research questions and a research strategy. By expressing my curiosity-driven enthusiasm in this introduction, I want to present the Gotthard as a fascinating topic of study. This introduction reflects upon the research process and makes the reader familiar with the topic in the same gradual way as I did. Sharing memories of my first encounters with the Gotthard image will bring us to various places in Switzerland, where the Gotthard recurs as a reference to different periods in Swiss history. The introduction offers many faces of the Gotthard, evokes many questions and risks being confusing. Yet, this elusiveness makes the ‘Gotthard’ an exiting and worthy topic of academic research.

The three sections of this introduction address the main phases of my project. First, I will describe images of the Gotthard in the Kunsthaus of Zurich and the Verkehrshaus in Lucerne, from which this research germinated. After having developed sensitivity to the Gotthard's images, they seemed to be everywhere. This led me on a search to learn more about the richness of the Gotthard's history and its symbolic meaning in Swiss society – the second stage of the project. Finally, I realised that despite the many existing studies on the Gotthard, the relationship between the Gotthard as a railway project and the Gotthard as a mythical geographical space has received little attention in scholarly research. From this insight, I developed my own research.

Image 1, Zurich Switzerland: The art museum, Kunsthaus, exhibits a painting entitled Der Gotthardpost. The painting depicts a yellow-and-black horse-drawn mail coach that descends the winding southern Gotthard pass road at full speed. A herd of cows obstructs the coach. A calf from the herd – frightened by the speed of the coach – jumps frantically out off the way. One of Switzerland's most famous painters, Rudolf Koller (1828-1905), painted it in the 1870s. In the museum, the painting figures next to other highlights of Swiss nineteenth and twentieth-century art works of, for example, Ferdinand Hodler and Johann Heinrich Füssli. Rumour has it that Koller himself disliked his creation, but the museum presents it as a successful Swiss interpretation of international realism and animal painting.

Curiosity about the Gotthard as a Swiss national image gave me the impulse to do this research. In today's Switzerland, the Gotthard metaphor represents a nineteenth- century railway project, a symbolic alpine space and national identity. The construction of the Gotthard Railway took place between 1872 and 1882, a period in which national identity formation increased in Europe. After the foundation of several large nation states, such as Italy and Germany, people in Switzerland – founded as a nation state in 1848 – intensified their search for a Swiss national identity. For the Swiss the Alps became a major national icon. At the same time, the construction of the Gotthard Railway and especially its Alpine tunnel stirred the minds of engineering experts, politicians and a large interested audience in Switzerland and Europe. In the late nineteenth century, contemporaries commonly emphasised the blessings of large technological projects as fulfilments of a country's dreams. These parallel developments through which people searched to give meaning to both large technological projects and national identity made interaction possible. Hence, this research started with the hypothesis that the power of the Gotthard image in Swiss society resulted from the co-construction of technology and identity.

In my research, I moved away from the majority of existing Gotthard studies that focus either on the history of the Gotthard Railway or on the Gotthard's geographical importance. The interaction between the construction of a large technological project and expressions of Swiss national identity has remained largely unexplored and herein lies the novelty of this study. It offers insight into the multilayered process of the mutual construction of technology and identity. This is a subject barely touched upon in historical case studies on technology.

The co-construction of technology and identity played out differently than I assumed. Reference to Swiss national identity did not enter any of the major engineering debates about the chosen construction method of the Gotthard Tunnel. Even though a patriotic, Austrian tunnel engineer started the polemic, the team of engineers working on the Gotthard Tunnel construction did not respond with nationalist arguments to his allegations. They did not seize the opportunity to claim the construction of the Gotthard Tunnel as a Swiss endeavour or as a choice for a Swiss construction method.

In 1936, Oskar Maurus Fontana, the well-known Austrian journalist, theatre critic and writer, published Der Weg durch den Berg, the path through the mountain. The novel tells the story of the Gotthard Tunnel construction in the form of a historical tale. Fontana explained that he stayed true to the historical facts but took the liberty to interpret them freely. The historical figures Louis Favre and Alfred Escher stood model for the central characters in the book. Fontana re-tells the history of the tunnel construction as a national deed. Protagonist Louis Favre is determined to construct the Gotthard Tunnel for the benefit of his country. He readily bears all responsibilities and risks to be able to conquer the Gotthard Mountain. In his battle, he met unexpected opposition from the local population and, as it seemed, from the Gotthard Mountain itself. However, while drilling the tunnel, Favre's relation with the Gotthard Mountain changes. One day, Favre expresses his increasing doubts about his work underneath the mountains. He explains to his daughter:

The novel follows Favre's quest in finding the answer to those questions. Technology, national identity and the Gotthard Mountain play key roles in the unfolding storyline. In this fictional history, the tunnel construction forms the décor against which the writer brings idealised Swiss and universal values to the fore.

Fontana's work of fiction is just one example of multiple novels that were published on the Gotthard before, during and shortly after the Second World War. In this period, the Gotthard inspired many novelists and playwrights outside and inside Switzerland. Two radio plays, two stage plays and six novels appeared that all touched upon the themes of collective identity, Gotthard Mountains and technological change. Most of this Gotthard fictional literature falls under the heading of ‘light reading’ and fits the German category Unterhaltungsromane453 or Heimatliteratur.

After 7.5 years of construction work the Gotthard Tunnel neared its breakthrough. Swiss newspaper articles tried to capture the shivers of anticipation. The northern- Swiss liberal Schaffhauser Intelligenzblatt published a little poem on February 24, 1880. The

Only four days later – not a week – the probe broke through the dividing tunnel wall. The next day, Sunday February 29, 1880, the Gotthard Railway Company orchestrated the ‘official’ breakthrough in the presence of journalists, high-ranking engineers and officials. The Gotthard Railway Company organised festivities mainly for the people directly involved in the construction work. The party gathered in the narrow tunnel to witness the workers drilling through the thin wall that still divided the southern and the northern headings. Around eleven o’clock, the two tunnel engineers in charge of the north and south side, Ernst Stockalper and Eduardo Bossi, embraced each other through the breach. The invited crowd followed their example and stepped over the threshold to celebrate the event. Tunnel inspector Kauffmann held a speech in the cramped and warm tunnel heading. In Göschenen, the telegraph service worked overtime to announce officially the news to the world. The Gotthard Railway Company distributed commemoration medals to the workers and it treated the officials and chief engineers the Gotthard Railway Company to a banquet in the machine hall of Airolo.

More than two years later, the formal inauguration of the complete Gotthard Railway took place. The inaugural festivities had an official and international character that exuded an atmosphere of well-staged lustre. A week before the railways would open for passengers, high officials from the three involved states, Switzerland, Germany and Italy, gathered to Lucerne to attend the festivities. The settings chosen for the festivities mirror the importance the organisers attached to the opening of the international railway line. Dozens of journalists received invitations. For days, the Swiss newspapers filled their front pages with reports and commentaries. Dignitaries held numerous speeches, knowing that the organisation had notified the press well in advance.

The inauguration of the Gotthard Railway gave the go-ahead for the railway's first summer schedule for passenger trains. The line with its longest rail tunnel in the world could finally be admired by everyone who could afford a train ticket. Curiosity, and the National Exhibition, accounted for the peak in first class traffic in the early years. More than a million passengers travelled the Gotthard Railway in 1883, its first full year of operation. After the initial wave of enthusiasm, the line operated as a successful international railway line The number of passengers on the Gotthard Railway continued to increase reaching two million in 1897. The tons of freight that passed on the railway exceeded all expectations. Soon the Gotthard transit surpassed the competing international alpine transit lines in Austria, Italy and France.

To advertise the Gotthard Railway, travel guides emphasised the decrease in travel time. It offered tourists from north-western Europe an efficient connection to the popular Lake Maggiore, Lake Como and Lake of Lugano as well as to the cities Milan, Naples and Rome. Before the opening of the Gotthard Railway a trip from Lucerne to Milan took 32 hours. The travellers took the steam ship over the Lake of Lucerne and changed to a mail coach over the Gotthard Pass by which they continued further south. In 1882, the railways covered the same distance in nine hours and 21 minutes; in 1891, the improved connections reduced the travel time to seven hours and 44 minutes. Travel guides presented the Gotthard railway not only as the swiftest but also as the most impressive transit in Europe. Moreover, they noted the ease to plan and organise a trip: with the new railway people could visit Italy for a short period without laborious preparations.

Yet, the fast connection threatened to marginalise Switzerland as a tourist destination because tourists would simply speed through Switzerland towards their Italian destinations. To prevent this from happening, an avalanche of leaflets, maps, posters and travel guides saw the light, which recommended tourists to visit the region with the Gotthard Railway. In a popular travel guide of that time, the German pedagogue, theologian and writer Woldemar Kaden wrote: “What a pity would it be when Switzerland would sink into a transit country.

‘Ambiguity’ is the best word with which to conclude. Throughout my search to understand the Gotthard as a national image, I saw the Gotthard image recurring as often as I saw it slipping away. When I thought I understood, it changed face, meaning or intensity. It was everything and nothing; alive and dead; powerful and laughed at; used and abused. Through my Gotthard research, Swiss friends started to accuse me smilingly of being more Swiss than they themselves. Those types of comments were just as ambivalent as the Gotthard image. They made me reflect on my position as an outsider, studying a classical Swiss image: maybe the vehement search for the Gotthard image lured me into believing that the Gotthard image was omnipresent and thus I believed in its strength more than the average Swiss citizen; or did I become super-Swiss because I could tell the Swiss details about their national image they barely knew?

A lot of research about the Gotthard's context had to be done before I grasped the richness of the Gotthard image, whereas for many Swiss, the icon had gained a sort of self-evident ‘feel’ that had no need for nuanced scrutiny. For those Swiss the Gotthard figures as some faint, but nevertheless well-known set of associations, which, in a positive or negative way, evokes a feeling of ‘something typically Swiss’. By deconstructing, historicising and contextualising the Gotthard as a national image, I re-constructed an image that might not circulate prominently in Swiss society today. Or does it?

In 2007, the Gotthard Railway celebrates its 125th jubilee year. During the preparation for this celebration, the Swiss debate about the future of the railway line. The Swiss government ordered the construction of a new major rail tunnel under the Gotthard Mountains to link to the European high speed railway network.552 To create an environment-friendly transit of goods through Switzerland, the Swiss people agreed in a referendum to support rail infrastructure rather than the development of roads. The old Gotthard railway line, with its curves and steepness, cannot carry the projected increase in European demand for freight and speed. In contrast to the old line, the new one will create ‘a flat rail link for future travel through the Alps’.

January 30, 1875, Franz Ržiha, Europe's leading tunnel engineer, gave a speech about the Gotthard Tunnel for his fellow engineers of the Association of Austrian Architects and Engineers in Vienna. Austrian engineers had a reputation to maintain in tunnelling. In 1854, the era of Alpine tunnels began with the successful construction of the Semmering Tunnel. By 1875, the Mont Cenis Tunnel had just opened (1871) and engineers were drawing plans for tunnels under the Simplon and the English Channel. Moreover, the lobby for an Arlberg tunnel was in full swing which heated the debates in Austria. Tunnelling boomed. Engineers came up with ever more audacious plans for tunnels, which required alternative solutions and adjustments to the existing practices. Therefore, all eyes focused on progress reports of the Gotthard Tunnel. This new European tunnel project would influence the discussion about future projects. That winter day in 1875, Ržiha lectured on what he had seen at the Gotthard with his own expert eyes. Given the dynamic background, he knew well that his judgement mattered.

Ržiha brought his findings clearly to the fore. He predicted that the Gotthard Tunnel would never finish on time. His lecture criticised basically every decision Louis Favre, the tunnel's entrepreneur, had made. Ržiha sketched the Gotthard Tunnel construction as an irrational endeavour. Indignation sounded through in his words, especially because he had recently published a state-of-the-art overview on tunnelling. According to Ržiha, nothing proved that Favre had taken notice of these latest scientific developments in the field of tunnelling. If Favre would continue the construction work in his faulty manner, he risked complete failure. The only option left, according to Ržiha, would be to change radically the chosen construction method: Favre needed to abandon the ‘Belgian method’ and opt for the ‘Austrian’ one.

The journal of Austrian Architects and Engineers in Vienna published the eminent engineer's lecture with its harsh criticism a few months later. The publication caused a great stir among engineers involved in the Gotthard Tunnel construction and readers interested in tunnelling. Newspapers and engineering journals reprinted and discussed Ržiha's disapproval at length. Disturbing news from the construction site fed these discussions. Newspapers reported lack of progress, tensions among the different parties, and the resignation of the Gotthard Railway Company's chief engineer Robert Gerwig.