Early Career (1952–1963)

Abstract

At the end of his military service in 1952, Louis Pouzin chose to return to civilian life, and began a career in industry. That was the year that the young Pouzin joined the Compagnie Industrielle des Telephones (CIT—Industrial Telephone Company) in Paris, which later became CIT-Alcatel, then Alcatel. This was a true industrial apprenticeship for the young engineer, who was in charge of machine manufacturing, receptioning parts and checking their quality. Louis says he was “dragged there” by his former telco manager from Polytechnique, who already worked there. “I began in a methods office, with a large room and offices, department heads, foremen, small groups… It wasn’t very exciting, but it was a good way to discover how the industry worked, in a company that manufactured telephone equipment, both switchboard and transmission equipment.” Around the age of twenty, he could easily have made his career in this telco subsidiary of the CGE (Compagnie Generale d’Electricite—General Electricity Company), climbed the rungs and participated in the development of the telephone industry in France… but fate had other plans and quickly pushed him in a different direction, towards what the German engineer Karl Steinbuch called, in 1957, “computer science”, or “information processing”.