George Alder Beggs

George Erle Beggs (born April 23, 1883 in Ashland (Illinois) , † November 23, 1939 in Princeton (New Jersey) ) was an American civil engineer. He is considered to be one of the founders of model statics .

Beggs studied civil engineering at Northwestern University with a bachelor's degree in 1905 and at Columbia University (with William Hubert Burr ) with a degree in 1910. He then worked for the American Bridge Company and the Phosphate Mining Company of Florida. From 1914 he taught at Princeton University as an assistant professor. From 1921 he was an associate professor and in 1930 he was given a full professorship. From 1937 to 1939 he was head of the civil engineering department.

He developed a groundbreaking method of experimentally determining influence lines on building models (Deformator von Beggs), which he applied for a patent in 1922 and about which he published in the journal of the American Concrete Institute (ACI) in the same year. For this he received the Wason Medal of the ACI. First he (from 1916) made measurements on trusses of bridges, later he extended this to statically indeterminate reinforced concrete structures. In 1926 he gave a lecture about this at the ETH Zurich , which was used in the renovation of the Grandfey Viaduct near Friborg. This contributed to the fact that the experimental structural engineering at ETH Zurich was expanded under Max Ritter and Karl Hofacker .

Beggs successfully used the method on the Arlington Memorial Bridge, Stevenson Creek Dam, the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, and the Golden Gate Bridge .

literature

• Karl-Eugen Kurrer : The History of the Theory of Structures. Searching for Equilibrium , Ernst & Sohn , 2018, p. 967f (biography), ISBN 978-3-433-03229-9