1 A Brief History of Reinforced Concrete - Routledge

1 A Brief History of Reinforced Concrete

Cement, in its various forms, has a surprisingly long history that spans back to prehistoric times. In contrast, the development of reinforced concrete is relatively recent. It is interesting to note that manure, clay, stone, timber, and metal were used "as is" in building. It took human creativity to put metal and concrete together to give it special properties and to invent or reinvent ways of using it to serve society.

C Invention in reinforced concrete started in the mid-nineteenth century with Joseph o Lambot's boat (Figure 1.1) and continues to our day. The brief view of the history of py reinforced concrete in this chapter is intended to emphasize to the student that there rig is still room for creativity in uses of reinforced concrete.

ht Lambot's main interest was agriculture. That was why his first commercial proded uct in reinforced concrete was a container for oranges. The next notable inventor M in reinforced concrete was another agriculturist, Joseph Monier, who also started at experimenting with reinforced concrete containers in 1867. In 1868, he projected er his concept to pipes. After having tried precast panels for architectural facades in ial 1872, in 1873 he expanded his container concept to build a large silo to hold cement. ? His success with the silo inspired him to build a bridge in 1875 at the Ch?teau Ta de Chazelet, France. The bridge led him to patent the concept of the reinforced conylo crete beam. His contribution was a series of pragmatic inventions that appeared to be r & the product of cut-and-try thinking.

Francois Hennebique, inspired by Monier's successes, developed a scientific

Fra approach to the proportioning of reinforced concrete elements to obtain a patent in n 1879, one that was denied to him in favor of Monier seven years later. The Hennebique cis construction company helped make reinforced concrete a serious construction mate-

rial in Europe. Hennebique's signal triumph was the initiation of a technical journal on reinforced concrete in 1896.

Hennebique's attempts at providing an intellectual underpinning for design attracted German engineers to consider reinforced concrete. Ritter (1899) recognized the nonlinearity of concrete at higher stresses and was the first to visualize a reinforced concrete beam not as it is, but as a truss. His ideas were further developed by Moersch (1902).

The initial attraction for using reinforced concrete in building construction may have been its fire resistance, but its increasing popularity was due to the creativity of engineers who kept extending its limits of application. The French engineer Francois Coignet expanded the use of reinforced concrete in European buildings. In the United States, William E. Ward built the first landmark building structure in reinforced concrete in Port Chester, New York (Figure 1.2). It did not take very long

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Principles of Reinforced Concrete Design

Figure 1.1 Boat built by Joseph Lambot, 1849. (Photo courtesy of the Mus?e du pays

C Brignolais.) opy for enterprising engineers in the United States to push the limit to 15 stories or 210 ft rig (Ingalls Building, Figure 1.3). In the same year, C. A. P. Turner built his first flat slab hte that popularized the construction of reinforced concrete buildings throughout the d world because of its phenomenal economy and convenience (Soven and Siess, 1963). M The next important height achievement was in Chicago's Executive House Hotel ate that reached 371 ft, completed in 1958. Convenient access to 6000 psi concrete and ri the concept of the flat plate (derived from the flat slab) enabled William Schmidt to al conceive the proportions of the Lake Point Tower (645 ft) in 1964, which was note? T worthy not only because of its height, but also because of its low cost (Figure 1.4).

a The height of Lake Point Tower was topped by the White Castle, also in Chicago, ylo which reached 961 ft. The next notable jumps were to 1476 ft in the Petronas Twin r & Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and 2684 ft in the Burj Khalifa building in F United Arab Emirates. Building height, also influenced by the state of the economy, ra is a good, if incomplete, indicator of the advances in building technology (Figure 1.5). nc Reinforced concrete became a successful building medium because of continual is improvements in its strength, its economy, its durability, its fire resistance, and its

beauty (Figure 1.6). The Monier and Hennebique experiments with bridges in reinforced concrete introduced the other aspect of reinforced concrete: its "plasticity" in encouraging elegance in the hands of engineering artists such as Robert Maillart of Switzerland (Figure 1.7) and Eduardo Torroja of Spain (Figure 1.8).

In the United States, creativity of the builders in reinforced concrete was supported by research in U.S. laboratories. As opposed to conceptual developments in Europe influenced strongly by the theory of elasticity, A. N. Talbot developed design methods based primarily on observation.* The effect of the water?cement ratio on

* His influence lasted in the United States until the end of the twentieth century, when research became an academic requirement. One of his students, Mikishi Abe, took Talbot's message of pragmatism to Japan, where it is still strong.

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Copyrighted Material ? Figure 1.2 First reinforced concrete building in the United States. (Port Chester, New T York, 1875). (Photo courtesy of Daniel Case/Wikimedia Commons.) ayl concrete strength was discovered by Duff Abrams in the early twentieth century. or & In a project sponsored by the membership of the American Concrete Institute, the

foundations for consistent design of reinforced concrete columns were developed by

Fr F. E. Richart, who made durable contributions to many aspects of design. an Hardy Cross worked on arches and frames to invent methods that enabled engi-

cis neers to deal with continuity, an essential requirement for designing reinforced con-

crete structures. Cross's creation of the moment-distribution method popularized the use of reinforced concrete structures. However, he is reported to have said that his method was too exact for inexact structures. He thought that knowing the conditions of equilibrium and developing a sense of deflected shapes of structural elements would suffice for proportioning of continuous frames. All young engineers would benefit immensely from reading Chapter 2 of the Cross?Morgan opus on continuous frames (Cross and Morgan, 1932). Westergaard was successful in simplifying plate theory for use in design. N. M. Newmark and C. P. Siess took the lead in developing simple design methods for reinforced concrete structures subjected to dynamic loads such as earthquake and blast and for prestressed concrete buildings and bridges.

Creativity in reinforced concrete was also observed in the construction arena. Slip-form construction was first used to build silos. Its later adaptation to build

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Principles of Reinforced Concrete Design

Copyrighted Materia Figure 1.3 Ingalls Building, Cincinnati, l Ohio, 1902. (From the U. S. Library of ? Congress, American Memory, . Ta .)

Figure 1.4 Lake Point Tower, Chicago, Illinois, 1964. (From John Kershner/ .)

ylor & reinforced concrete walls revolutionized the construction scene. This was matched Fr by developments in precast construction.

an Because concrete has a tendency to change its volume with time, methods had cis to be developed to control negative effects of such changes, especially in massive

concrete structures such as dams. The Bureau of Reclamation in Denver, Colorado,

provided the intellectual underpinnings for the achievement of such magnificent proj-

ects as the successful construction of Boulder and Grand Coulee Dams in the 1930s.

Reinforced concrete continues to be improved. During the last decade of the

twentieth century, the compressive strength of concrete moved well above 10,000

psi from a typical 4000 psi. Self-consolidating concrete made casting of complicated

shapes an easy task. Every aspect of the short history of reinforced concrete indi-

cates that the inventions will continue.

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Height, ft

3000 2500 2000 1500 1000

500 0 1900 1904 1922 1958 1960 1962 1964 1967 1970 1975 1989 1990 1996 2009 2010 Year

Figure 1.5

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reinforced concrete

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buildings.

Francis

Figure 1.6 Nariwa Museum designed by Tadao Ando, Japan. (Photo courtesy of N. Hanai.)

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Principles of Reinforced Concrete Design

Copyrighted Material ? Tay Figure 1.7 Bridge designed by Maillart, Switzerland. (From Rama [CC-BY-SA-2.0-fr lor & ()], Wikimedia Commons.)

Francis

Figure 1.8 Torroja's Aqueduct in Alloz, Spain. (Photo courtesy of Juan Manuel Galindo de Pablos.)

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Bare Essentials

Reinforced concrete became a successful building medium because of continual improvements in its strength, its economy, its durability, its fire resistance, and its beauty.

The ongoing momentum of developments in its strength, its durability, and its pliability to fit creative architectural demands suggests that this structural composite continues to be wide open to invention.

Copyrighted Material ? Taylor & Francis

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