Introduction - Design of Reinforced Concrete - page 5

Two reinforced concrete hollow cylinders each 65 ft in diameter and 185 ft high being towed to
North Sea location as part of oil drilling platform. (Courtesy of United Nations, J. Moss.)
menters with reinforced concrete included the Englishmen William Fairbairn and William
B. Wilkinson, the German G. A. Wayss, and another Frenchman, François Hennebique. 3,4
William E. Ward built the first reinforced concrete building in the United States in Port
Chester, New York, in 1875. In 1883 he presented a paper before the American Society of
Mechanical Engineers in which he claimed that he got the idea of reinforced concrete by
watching English laborers in 1867 trying to remove hardened cement from their iron tools. 5
Thaddeus Hyatt, an American, was probably the first person to correctly analyze the
stresses in a reinforced concrete beam, and in 1877 he published a 28-page topic on the
subject, entitled An Account of Some Experiments with Portland Cement Concrete, Com-
bined with Iron as a Building Material . In this topic he praised the use of reinforced con-
crete and said that “rolled beams (steel) have to be taken largely on faith.” Hyatt put a
great deal of emphasis on the high fire resistance of concrete. 6
E. L. Ransome of San Francisco reportedly used reinforced concrete in the early 1870s
and was the originator of deformed (or twisted) bars, for which he received a patent in
1884. These bars, which were square in cross section, were cold-twisted with one complete
3 Straub, H., 1964, A History of Civil Engineering (Cambridge: MIT Press), pp. 205-215. Translated from the
German Die Geschichte der Bauingenieurkunst (Basel: Verlag Birkhauser), 1949
4 Kirby, R. S., and Laurson, P. G., 1932, The Early Years of Modern Civil Engineering (New Haven: Yale
University Press), pp. 273-275.
5 Ward, W. E., 1883, “Béton in Combination with Iron as a Building Material,” Transactions ASME , 4, pp. 388-403.
6 Kirby, R. S., and Laurson, P. G., 1932, The Early Years of Modern Civil Engineering (New Haven: Yale
University Press), p. 275.