City & Region

In a nutshell

Grenoble’s university goes back to 1339, when the Dauphin Humbert II founded it. In the late 19th century the mountains’ water power made the city a centre of electrical engineering. The big international machines arrived much later, after a nuclear research centre opened in the 1950s under the physicist Louis Néel. This page sketches that story and places Grenoble on the TheScience.fm Atlas.

Six centuries of university

Grenoble’s first university classes were held in rented rooms on Place Saint-André. The university’s fortunes were uneven: according to its own history, activity faded at the end of the 14th century, the university was abolished in 1452 in favour of Valence and restored in 1542. A law school opened in 1806, and a decentralisation decree of 1896 re-created the university, inaugurated the following year by President Félix Faure.

In 1962 the first stone was laid of the large campus at Saint-Martin-d’Hères. Between 1969 and 1971 the faculties were reorganised into three universities. They merged in 2016, and Université Grenoble Alpes in its present form, bringing together the university, engineering schools and research bodies, was established on 1 January 2020.

White coal: water power and engineering

Grenoble’s technical tradition began with water. In 1869 Aristide Bergès founded a paper mill at Lancey, driven by the waterfalls of the Belledonne range, and in 1882 he popularised the term “houille blanche”, white coal, for hydropower, convinced that mountain water could produce as much energy as coal.

Industry needed engineers. In 1892 the physicist Paul Janet started an evening course in industrial electricity, which led to the Institute of Electrotechnics, opened in 1900. In 1921 its engineering courses took the name Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble, and in 1925 the city hosted the International Exhibition of Hydropower and Tourism, from 21 May to 25 October. Today’s Grenoble INP grew from these schools; its first president, in 1971, was Louis Néel.

From magnetism to microchips

Louis Néel came to Grenoble during the Second World War, and at the end of 1945 his team set up a CNRS laboratory there, associated with the university. In 1956 he founded the Centre d’Études Nucléaires de Grenoble (CENG), part of the CEA. Its research reactors, Mélusine (1958–1988), Siloé (1963–1997) and Siloette (1964–2002), have since been shut down and dismantled; the CEA completed the dismantling work at the end of 2012.

The centre’s electronics department grew into CEA-Leti, founded in 1967, which today develops micro- and nanotechnologies with industry. The same year, Néel’s influence helped bring the ILL to Grenoble; the ESRF followed in 1988. The two machines are described on The European Synchrotron and Europe’s neutron source.

A Nobel discovery in Grenoble’s magnets

Magnetism research also produced a facility for very strong magnetic fields, now part of the CNRS national high magnetic field laboratory (LNCMI). It was in Grenoble’s high fields, on 4–5 February 1980, that Klaus von Klitzing discovered the quantum Hall effect, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1985. From 1972 the Grenoble lab worked with the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart; in 2009 it merged with the pulsed-field lab in Toulouse to form the LNCMI.

Science in the mountains

The Alps are also a subject of research. The Institute of Environmental Geosciences (IGE), run by the CNRS, Université Grenoble Alpes, INRAE, IRD and Grenoble INP, studies the climate system, glaciers and ice sheets, ice cores and water, with a focus on polar, tropical and mountain regions.

High above the valley, the university and the CNRS run the Lautaret Garden, a botanical garden and research support unit at about 2,100 metres. Professor Jean-Paul Lachmann of the University of Grenoble created the first alpine garden at the pass in 1899; it was moved in 1919 to make way for the new Galibier road. Today it holds more than 2,000 plant species from the Alps and the world’s main mountain ranges, and a laboratory chalet next to it is used to study how plants adapt to extreme conditions and how changes in climate and farming affect them.

On the Atlas

On the TheScience.fm Atlas, Grenoble is the first stop on the Big Machines route, which continues to Geneva (geneva.science), Lausanne (lausanne.science), Villigen (villigen.science) and Frascati (frascati.science). The research institutes themselves are listed on Institutes & Facilities.

On the Atlas

Grenoble is the first stop on the Big Machines route of the TheScience.fm Atlas, which links large research machines for particles, photons and plasma. The next stop is Geneva.