Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Dietlein

Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Dietlein (born May 31, 1787 in Halle an der Saale ; † August 30, 1837 in Berlin ) was a German civil engineer who was the first to teach bridge construction at the Berlin Academy of Construction . There he was the teacher of bridge builder John August Roebling .

Dietlein came from a respected family, his father Georg Christian Dietlein was a businessman in Halle and his mother - Sophie Christiane, née Schiff - came from an entrepreneurial family. He studied in Halle during the troubled times of the Napoleonic Wars and became a Prussian district architect in Halle in 1815. At the same time he published a treatise on making the Saale navigable. In 1817 he became a building inspector in Merseburg. After receiving his doctorate in Halle in 1824, he was appointed by the director Johann Albert Eytelwein as a teacher at the newly founded Bauakademie in Berlin, where he became a professor in 1826. In the winter semester of 1824/25 he already gave three courses (statics, mechanical engineering and road construction, bridge construction, canal and lock construction). At that time, John August Roebling was one of his students. When his protégé Eytelwein gave up the management of the building academy in 1830 for health reasons (and also handed over the management of the senior building deputation to Schinkel) Dietlein fell victim to the reconstruction of the academy under his successor Christian Peter Wilhelm Beuth . A number of other professors also left the building academy at that time. His lectures, printed in 1832, continued to be used as a textbook.

In 1831 he became a member of the Prussian ministerial building commission and superstructure inspector as the successor to building officer Moser and was involved in public buildings in Berlin, for example in the interior reconstruction of the German Cathedral on Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin in 1832 (under Friedrich Wilhelm Langerhans ) and in 1837 in the rebuilding of the Prussian Interior Ministry (Unter den Linden 72/73, under the direction of Karl Friedrich Schinkel , destroyed in World War II). In the same year he died of cholera . In addition to his work for the ministerial building commission, he examined building tradesmen.

In 1820 he published the works of the French civil engineer Jean Rodolphe Peronnet (1708–1794), which were particularly applicable to hydraulic engineering and bridge construction. In 1825 he translated Navier's book on suspension bridges from French. For a long time it was the standard German work. In 1832 his lectures at the Bauakademie were published, but they had already appeared in the journal Journal für die Baukunst von August Crelle . Dietlein also published in Crelle's Journal for Pure and Applied Mathematics .

In 1829 he became a member of the influential Berlin Association for the Promotion of Industry.

He was married to Christiane Friederike Kerkow and had at least one son and two daughters with her, the daughter Wilhelmine being born in 1827. The widow moved to Halle after Dietlein's death.

Fonts (selection)

• As a translator and editor; Perronet's works, the description of the designs of the bridges at Neuilli, Nantes, Orleans, Louis XVI etc., the design of the Burgundian canal and the aqueduct from the Yvette and Bievre to Paris as well as several individual treatises , Halle 1820 (preface by Johann Albert Eytelwein)
• As translator and editor: Navier's treatise on suspension bridges , Berlin 1825
• Basics of the lectures on road, bridge, lock, canal, river, dike and port construction, held at the royal building academy in Berlin from 1824–1831 , Berlin: Reimer 1832

Web links

• Biography of Bernd Nebel