Heinrich Gottfried Gerber

Heinrich Gottfried Gerber

Heinrich Gottfried Gerber (born November 18, 1832 in Hof , † January 3, 1912 in Munich ) was a German civil engineer and inventor of the Gerber carrier .

Life

The " Gerber House " (1861) was the "bridge building office" of the assembly area with offices and drawing rooms in Gustavsburg.

Plaque

Gerber studied at the Polytechnic School in Nuremberg and the Polytechnic School in Munich . In 1852 he joined the Bavarian State Building Service and initially worked on the Bayreuth – Neuenmarkt railway line . At the beginning of 1854 he was employed as an assistant in the construction management of the Großhesseloher Bridge and in the summer of 1855 he was taken over into the administration of the Royal Bavarian State Railways in Munich, where he participated in the planning work for this bridge. After the exams for the higher state building service in the year 1856 the construction management of the Großhesseloher bridge was entrusted to him, whose design came from Friedrich August von Pauli and which provided for the lens carrier (Pauli carrier) developed by him . The executing company was the iron foundry and machine factory Klett & Comp. in Nuremberg. The implementation plans for the bridge were drawn up in close cooperation between von Pauli, Johann Ludwig Werder , the director of Klett, and Gerber. After the completion of the bridge in 1857, he was appointed in the summer of 1858 by Theodor von Cramer-Klett and Werder, with von Pauli's consent, as chief engineer of the bridge construction department of the Klett machine factory in Nuremberg. There he carried out numerous tests and calculations using rivets and bolts in trusses .

In 1859 the company received the order to build the railway bridge over the Rhine near Mainz . For logistical reasons, it was decided to manufacture the bridge parts in a provisional factory near the construction site in Gustavsburg , as a considerable amount of rolled iron from the Saarland and the Lower Rhine would have to be transported first to Nuremberg and then back to Gustavsburg as finished bridge parts. Through follow-up orders, the "provisional" was transformed into a permanent branch or branch of the iron foundry and machine factory Klett & Comp. This resulted in the MAN plant in Gustavsburg , whose founder is considered to be Gerber.

In 1860, Gerber and his family relocated to the factory in Gustavsburg in order to manage the manufacture and construction of the bridge until it was completed in 1863.

In his subsequent time in Nuremberg, he worked on continuous girders , which are statically determined by the inclusion of joints and can therefore be calculated more easily. In 1866 he received the Bavarian patent for beam carriers with exposed support points . This girder was first used in 1867 for a bridge over the Regnitz near Bamberg and the Main Bridge in Haßfurt . This type of construction spread rapidly and became known worldwide as the tanner carrier .

Gerber's diary entry 1866

In 1868 Gerber went back to Gustavsburg to manage the construction of the second track of the Rhine bridge. Then he set up an office in Munich. As part of the conversion of the Nuremberg parent company to the Maschinenbau-Actiengesellschaft Nürnberg , the plant in Gustavsburg and its Munich office became the Süddeutsche Brückenbau AG in Munich with Gerber as a member of the board. During this time he dealt among other things with development work on junctions of trusses, the other tasks of a board of directors were less his. At his own suggestion, this company was transferred to Maschinenbau-Aktiengesellschaft Nürnberg (today MAN ) in 1884 . Gerber became a member of the supervisory board and technical advisory board and continued to devote himself to his research and consulting activities.

He is considered to be the founder of the Gustavsburg School of steel construction and bridge construction.

Buildings

South bridge

• South bridge in Mainz
• Street bascule bridge at the Nicolaus Bastion of the Mainz fortress
• “Railway counterweight flap” over the entrance to the winter harbor in Mainz
• Swing bridge at Fort Gustavsburg near Mainz
• Design and construction of the Marienbrücke near Neuschwanstein Castle , 1866
• Braunau railway bridge in Munich
• Design of the station hall in Mainz (1883)

In total, he helped build around 600 bridges.

Honors

In Hof, Gerber's hometown, a plaque commemorates the engineer and the tanner bearer. The same plaque was set up on the Sophienbrücke in Bamberg, which was the first to be erected in 1867 as a Gerberträger bridge - the plaque is now on the successor building, the Luitpoldbrücke.

Gerber also received many honors such as two knight's crosses, honorary memberships and an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Munich in 1902 . In 1911 he was awarded the gold medal for outstanding engineering achievements by the Prussian Academy of Civil Engineering. In 1935 a labor camp in Trogen was named after him.

A street in the Cramer-Klett settlement in Gustavsburg is named after him.

Fonts

• The Paulian carrier system. Nuremberg 1859.
• The Rhine bridge near Mainz. Mainz 1863.
• The calculation of the bridge girders according to the Pauli system . In: Journal of the Association of German Engineers , ZDB -ID 200611-x , 1865.
• Beams with exposed support points. In: Journal of the Bavarian Architects and Engineers Association , ZDB -ID 163830-0 , 1870.
• Determination of the allowable stresses in iron structures . 1874.
• Notes on iron structures with articulated joints . In: Zeitschrift für Baukunde , ZDB -ID 540201-3 , 1882.
• Boarding halls in the central train station in Munich . In: Organ for Advances in Railways , ZDB -ID 552263-8 , 1887

literature

• Ludwig Freytag: Heinrich Gerber, old master of German iron construction . In: Conrad Matschoss (ed.): Contributions to the history of technology and industry. ( ZDB -ID 2238668-3 ) Volume 10, Springer, Berlin 1920, pp. 93-102. ( Full text online )
• Walter Pelikan: On the 125th birthday of Heinrich Gerber . In: Der Stahlbau , 26th year 1957, issue 11, p. 317.
• Walter Sbrzesny:  Gerber, Johann Gottfried Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7 , p. 255 ( digitized version ).
• Max Carstanjen: Heinrich Gerber. In: Deutsche Bauzeitung , Volume 46, 1912, No. 7 (from January 24, 1912), pp. 74–78. ( Digitized at the Brandenburg Technical University Cottbus)

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Gottfried Gerber  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• A portrait of Heinrich Gottfried Gerber, the inventor of the cantilever bridges, on www.marlesreuth.de ( Memento from March 10, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
• Project Gerber Diaries, Potsdam University of Applied Sciences

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Description of the patent on December 6, 1866 awarded to the engineer Gerber on beam supports with exposed support points. In: Journal of the Bavarian Architects and Engineers Association , year 1870, p. 25 (p. 29 in digital copy)
2. ↑ Figures on page VI of the patent
3. ^ Kurt Klöppel : 100 Years of the Gustavsburg School. In: MAN-HA N 113 , 1960.
4. ^ Karl-Eugen Kurrer : Genius loci of steel construction. Mainz, Gustavsburg and the German Steel Construction Day 2008. In: Stahlbau , 78th year 2009, pp. 108–123.