Carl Lentze

Carl Lentze (born July 12, 1801 in Soest ; † June 23, 1883 in Berlin ) was a German builder and engineer.

Life

After the surveyor's examination , Carl Lentze entered the Prussian civil service in 1823. In 1829 he passed the master builder examination. After initial construction projects in the province of Pomerania and in the administrative district of Düsseldorf , he was appointed royal hydraulic engineering inspector in Münster in 1832 and transferred to Düsseldorf in the same position a year later . In 1844 he was commissioned to create the first drafts for the Dirschau bridge across the Vistula . In 1845 he was appointed to the Royal Commission for the Construction of the Vistula and Nogat Bridges and appointed to the Government and Building Councilor. There he was initially involved in the construction of the Oberland Canal . When the planning work for the bridges was stopped for political reasons, Lentze became a provisional member in 1847 and a full member of the Royal Building Council in 1848 .

In 1849 he developed the design of a railway suspension bridge over the Rhine near Cologne and in 1850 also participated in the competition for the Cologne railway bridge with a suspension bridge project.

With the resumption of the construction projects for the eastern railway bridges, he was appointed chairman of the Royal Commission for bridge construction and the associated electricity and dike regulations on the Weichsel and Nogat, based in Dirschau . He visited Great Britain for study purposes and inspected the Britannia Bridge , a full-walled iron girder bridge , which is about to be completed . Thereupon he dropped his original intention to run the Eastern Railway over suspension bridges. As the responsible planner, he rather developed close-meshed lattice girders for the bridges over the Vistula near Dirschau and the Nogat near Marienburg, the construction of which - also in view of their span - meant a pioneering achievement for bridge construction and the railway industry in Germany, albeit the structural engineering used after a few decades Principles and methods were out of date. On the relief attached to the west portal of the Dirschau railway bridge with the idealized representation of the opening of the bridge by King Wilhelm IV and the princes, there is also a representation of Lentze with a plan.

After completing the Ostbahnbrücke project, Lentze was transferred to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Public Works as a lecturing council in 1858 . In this function he was a member of the board of directors of the Berlin Building Academy . In 1859 he was appointed a secret senior building officer. Most recently, he was in charge of the preparatory work for the construction of the Kiel Canal . In 1866 he was retired. Lentze was an authorized representative of Prussia and the North German Confederation of the International Commission on the piercing of the Suez Isthmus .

Sources and literature

• Carl Lentze. His life's work in pictures, probably created by Carl Lentze and his descendants, part of the Hubertus Schwartz estate, Soest City Archives
• Secret Oberbaurath a. D. Karl Lentze † . In: Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung , Volume 3, No. 26 (June 30, 1883), p. 233 f. ( Digitized version )
• Judith Breuer: The first Prussian railway bridges. Dirschau. Marienburg. Cologne. Book accompanying the exhibition of the East Prussian State Museum Lüneburg, Stuttgart 1988, pp. 21 - 24, 26, 29f, 39, 58 - 60, 63, 83