Leonard Frank Cooling

Leonard Frank Cooling (born December 23, 1903 in Solihull near Birmingham , † February 15, 1977 in Watford ) was a British geotechnician and pioneer of soil mechanics in Great Britain.

Cooling studied from 1922 at Birmingham University , where he graduated in physics in 1926. From 1927 he was at the Building Research Station (BRS) in Watford, the leading British state building research institute. At the time, the professor emeritus of civil engineering in Oxford, CB Jenkin, was doing experiments on soil mechanics, for example the earth pressure on retaining walls or the shear strength of clay. After Jenkin's withdrawal, the management of his own soil mechanics laboratory at BRS Cooling was transferred (1933), the first in Great Britain. He established modern experimental methods , such as those previously developed by Karl von Terzaghi . They also worked for the Road Research Board, for example investigating embankment slides on railways. Alec Skempton joined the group in 1937 and in the same year the investigation of the landslide at Chingford Dam, in which Terzaghi was also involved, marked the actual beginning of modern soil mechanics in Great Britain. In 1936, Cooling was the only one to represent Great Britain at the first international congress for soil mechanics at Harvard University (at the next 1948 there were already 74 delegates from Great Britain). Cooling headed the laboratory, which had the leading role in Great Britain until the mid-1940s, until 1959 and then became overall director of physics, soil mechanics and materials research at the BRS. In 1968 he retired.

In 1952 he received a D. Sc. from Birmingham University. In 1962 he was a Rankine Lecturer ( Field measurements in soil mechanics ).

literature

Obituary by Skempton in Geotechnique, Volume 27, 1977, p. 265