Kurt Beyer

Prof. Kurt Beyer (Dresden around 1950)

Kurt Beyer (born December 27, 1881 in Dresden ; † May 9, 1952 there ; full name: Friedrich August Kurt Beyer ) was a German civil engineer and university professor .

Life

Kurt Beyer was born in Dresden on December 27, 1881. After graduating from the Dreikönigsschule in Dresden-Neustadt, he began studying civil engineering at the Dresden Technical University on April 15, 1901 , where he became a member of the Cheruskia fraternity in 1901 . He first attracted attention when he presented the best solution to the task "Determining the altitude of points using standard methods and determining and demonstrating the propagation of errors during measurement". He received the first prize donated by the civil engineering department due to the change of rectorate in 1904. In 1905 he completed his studies with the title "passed with distinction".

Beyer began his professional career on January 1, 1906 as a government construction manager ( trainee lawyer ) in the Saxon road and hydraulic engineering administration. On April 1st of the same year he became an assistant at the chair for structural engineering, strength theory and steel bridge construction. In 1907, under the chairmanship of his teacher Georg Christoph Mehrtens , he defended his dissertation “Dead weight, favorable basic dimensions and historical development of the cantilever beams” with “summa cum laude” and was awarded a doctorate in engineering.

After Beyer had finished his assistantship on July 1, 1908, he began to leave his mark on major projects in Siam (today: Thailand ) as a section engineer for the Siamese State Railways - including the construction of the Bondora Bridge over the Mae Nam Chao Phraya ( Chao -Phraya River , also: "Menam"), during the construction of the first port facility in Bangkok and the planning for the new construction of the Royal Palace , which was never realized because of the death of the king on October 23, 1910. Beyer's involvement in Thailand was not unusual for this period. In addition to the architect Karl Döhring , around 50 German engineers worked for the Thai state railway from 1891 to 1914, including Karl Bethge , Luis Weiler and Emil Eisenhofer . From April 1, 1911, Beyer began working as a structural engineering advisor to the Siam Ministry of the Interior, with a focus on the design and construction of reinforced concrete bridges.

A malar fever in the summer of 1914 forced him to return to Germany. There he passed the second state examination for the higher technical civil service in construction with distinction, received a state award and was appointed government master builder ( Assessor ). The return to Southeast Asia was prevented by the outbreak of the First World War .

The First World War took the war volunteer Beyer to Galicia and Bukovina as a fighter ; later he went to Turkey as a government builder for the German field railroad chief to build workshops for the Anatol and Baghdad railways .

Kurt Beyer's grave in the Loschwitz cemetery

On February 1, 1919, he was appointed full professor to the chair for statics of building structures and technical mechanics for civil engineers at the Dresden University of Technology. Up until then, the structural engineering department was part of the chair for iron bridges, strength theory and structural engineering, which Willy Gehler had held since 1913 . Beyer was head of the civil engineering department from 1920 to 1922, 1930 to 1932 and 1941 to 1945. He resisted numerous offers of appointment, for example to Graz in 1926, to the Technical University of Munich in 1934 or to the Technical University of Berlin in 1936 , which underlines his outstanding professional rank.

As early as 1927 Beyer had founded an engineering office in which he mainly employed former students and which dealt with solving structural tasks from many areas of bridge, mining and hydraulic engineering. Beyer was called in in 1938 for military exercises. In 1939, the 58-year-old also took part in the Second World War, but a year later, at the insistence of industry, he was declared “indispensable” and retired from military service. Until 1944 he was a professor at the Technical University of Dresden.

From 1945 onwards, Beyer devoted himself to the temporary reconstruction of the destroyed Dresden Elbe bridges and until 1950 took over the management of the main construction department of the state of Saxony. When he started teaching at the Technical University of Dresden in 1946, he took over lectures in steel bridge and structural steel construction, building materials and strength theory until his retirement in 1951.

Beyer became a full member of the Saxon Academy in 1948 and a full member of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1949 . He died on May 9, 1952 in Dresden, his grave is in the Loschwitz cemetery .

The scientific work

Beyer has published numerous fundamental scientific papers. Since 1923 he worked on his most important theoretical work, “The statics in reinforced concrete” (1927), also known as the “Beyer Bible”. The systematics for solving systems of linear equations included in his book is remarkable.

In addition to the direct solution of systems of equations, he also deals with their iterative solution. The further development of the iterative solution of systems of equations later led to the Cross method and the Kani method .

The term matrix , which we are familiar with today when formulating structural relationships, was also introduced by Beyer when solving systems of linear equations. His fundamental research on turbine foundations, which he implemented internationally as dynamically stressed structures, led to their increased reliability.

The buildings

Before the First World War, Beyer gained experience in the construction of port facilities and railway bridges in Southeast Asia. As an expert for the mining companies and as a close employee of the ASW , which at that time had its company headquarters near the TH Dresden , he supported the development and manufacture of overburden conveyor bridges, bucket chain excavators, bucket wheel excavators and other equipment that the flourishing lignite mining industry needed. Beyer was thus significantly involved in the development of the large open-cast mine in Central Europe.

His design for the road bridge in Meißen from 1933 won first prize and was carried out that same year. At the gates of Dresden, Beyer was responsible for the design and construction of the Niederwartha pumped storage plant from 1928 to 1930 . Other hydropower plants he was involved in building are the Sosa and Cranzahl reservoirs , as well as the elevated water reservoir and the water supply distribution lines in Aue .

Others

The building designed by Martin Dülfer , in which civil engineers from the Technical University of Dresden have been researching and teaching since 1913, has been called the “ Beyer-Bau ” since 1952 .

The Faculty of Civil Engineering at the Technical University of Dresden has been awarding the Kurt Beyer Prize for outstanding theses since 1966.

In his life, he was able to implement his professional ideal of “combining scientific knowledge and practical use” as an example for other generations of civil engineers. Unlike his colleague Willy Gehler in Dresden , Kurt Beyer kept his distance from Nazi organizations such as the NSDAP , SA and SS and renounced any privileges that sympathizers would receive if they had come to terms with the cult of the Führer and hatred of Jews for self-interested reasons. He demonstrated courage and assertiveness more than once when it came to stopping the presumptuousness of local SA sizes and averting damage to the chair and student body. "On the one hand, Beyer was considered strict and sometimes even a bit rough, on the other hand he was known for his humanity, sincerity, helpfulness, kindness and great work intensity." In November 1933 he signed the confession of the German professors to Adolf Hitler .

estate

Kurt Beyer's estate is kept in the university archive of the Technical University of Dresden .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ernst Elsheimer (ed.): Directory of the old fraternity members according to the status of the winter semester 1927/28. Frankfurt am Main 1928, p. 35.
2. ↑ Members: Kurt Beyer, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig, accessed on February 22, 2015 . 
3. ^ Members of the previous academies. Friedrich August Kurt Beyer. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on February 22, 2015 . 
4. ^ Bernd Möller, Wolfgang Graf: Kurt Beyer (1881–1952). Memory of an important structural engineer and civil engineer. In: Bautechnik , Volume 79, 2002, No. 5, p. 337.

literature

• Gerald Hacke: Portrait of Kurt Beyer. In: Dorit Petschel : 175 years of TU Dresden. Volume 3: The professors of the TU Dresden 1828–2003. Edited on behalf of the Society of Friends and Supporters of the TU Dresden e. V. von Reiner Pommerin , Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 2003, ISBN 3-412-02503-8 , pp. 88-89.
• Falk Hensel: The restart at the Technical University of Dresden 1945. The careers of Kurt Beyer and Willy Gehler. Munich 2010.
• M. Koch, G. Franz, H. Steup: Kurt Beyer - university lecturer and civil engineer in theory and practice . In: VDI yearbook of the Gesellschaft für Bautechnik 1992 . Part III (Outstanding engineering achievements in structural engineering). VDI-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1992, pp. 355-393.
• Bernd Möller, Wolfgang Graf: Kurt Beyer (1881–1952). Memory of an important structural engineer and civil engineer. In: Bautechnik , Volume 79, 2002, No. 5, pp. 335–339.
• Heinz Neuber:  Beyer, Kurt Friedrich August. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 206 ( digitized version ).
• Klaus Stiglat : Civil engineers and their work. Ernst & Son , 2003.
• Karl-Eugen Kurrer : Kurt Beyer's contribution to structural analysis. In: Proceedings 29th Dresden Bridge Construction Symposium, ed. v. Manfred Curbach , pp. 101-126. Dresden: Institute for Solid Construction of the TU Dresden 2019, ISBN 978-3-86780-585-8 , pp. 101–126, s. a. Concrete and reinforced concrete construction 115 (2020), Issue 1, pp. 62–80, ISSN 0005-9900

Fonts

• Dead weight, favorable basic dimensions and historical development of the cantilever beam . Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann 1908.
• The statics in reinforced concrete construction . Stuttgart: Konrad Wittwer Verlag 1927.
• The statics in reinforced concrete construction . A teaching and manual of structural engineering, volume I u. II. Berlin: Springer Verlag 1933 u. 1934.
• The statics in reinforced concrete construction . A teaching and manual for structural engineering. Berlin: Springer Verlag 1948, 1956 a. 1987.

Web links

• Literature by and about Kurt Beyer in the catalog of the German National Library