Joseph Monier

Joseph Monier

Joseph Monier (born November 8, 1823 in Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie , France , † March 12, 1906 in Paris ) was a French gardener, inventor and entrepreneur. He is considered to be the inventor of reinforced concrete , even if others such as François Martin Lebrun , François Coignet and Joseph-Louis Lambot had already made similar discoveries, but did not pursue them, or only for a short time. The German name for reinforcing steel , "Moniereisen", goes back to his name .

His inventions began with the production of plant boxes for portable orange trees in stately gardens (and not from flower pots , as mentioned often) from the time the cement mixture called from cement , sand, slag or broken bricks and water and an insert of wire mesh . He soon used the principle of connecting cement and wire mesh in the construction of artificial rock gardens and extended it to the manufacture of water tanks, pipes, smaller bridges, stairs and concrete girders. While his ideas had a limited influence in France and were essentially limited to gardening and landscaping in practice, they were picked up in Germany by Gustav Adolf Wayss and Conrad Freytag and quickly incorporated by construction companies such as Wayss & Freytag and Beton- und Monierbau the everyday construction practice, especially bridge construction, was introduced and further developed.

Life

Joseph Monier comes from a gardening family who lived for generations in the village of Saint-Quentin, 5 km north of Uzès and around 29 km north of Nîmes , and worked for the dukes of Uzès , the feudal lords of the Uzès area. Joseph was the sixth of ten children, but only six of them reached adulthood. As was common at the time, he could not go to school because all strength was needed at work. In 1842, when he was just 19 years old, the Duke took him to his palace in Paris. During this time he learned to read and write. His gardening found recognition, so that the Duke occasionally loaned him out for other stately gardens , which gave him the contacts that were later useful. After four years he seized the opportunity to get a job in the Jardin des Tuileries , where he was responsible for the orangery and the delicate greenhouse plants. Soon he was looking for a more permanent and cheaper replacement for the not long-lasting wooden planters in which the orange trees were raised and transported. He therefore began boxes from the time the term cement manufacture combined mixture of cement, sand, slag or broken bricks and water and an insert of wire mesh. Apparently he experimented with these containers for a number of years to find the best composition of his material.

As a gardener, he naturally noticed that these boxes could also serve as water containers, for which he recognized a greater need at a time when there was no public water supply. Without giving up his position in the Tuileries, he started a small business as a landscaper in 1849, with which he received orders from more distant places such as Versailles , Strasbourg or even Hyères . La Rocaille was the fashion of the time, i.e. gardens with artificial rock groups and grottos, which he made with his iron cement ( ciment et fer ). With the material he could also make small pavilions and barrels that looked like they were made of wood.

In May 1857 he married Françoise Jaquey, with whom he had two sons.

In July 1867 he presented his ideas at the second Paris World Exhibition and applied for his first patent for garden containers, which was granted to him under number 77165. In 1868 he extended his patent to pipes, then to water basins and later to larger panels.

He employed fifteen workers and three foremen at the time. His business on the outskirts of Paris (not far from today's Étoile ) comprised offices, workshops, greenhouses and stables for eight draft horses and three carriage horses.

In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, Joseph Monier lost practically all of his possessions. At the end of the four-month siege of Paris , the starving population ransacked his farm in search of food, including horses. The Prussian bombardment in January 1871 destroyed the rest. Monier and his family barely survived the winter with temperatures down to minus 23 ° C.

After the peace agreement, he was able to laboriously rebuild his business under the difficult conditions of the Paris Commune . He built a large number of closed water tanks, especially in the Paris area, of which one in Bougival had a volume of 130 m³ and two near Sèvres had a volume of 1000 m³. Due to his reputation, which was spread almost exclusively through word of mouth , he was even able to carry out work for Alphonse de Rothschild in the park of Ferrières Castle . It was important to Monier to ask his customers about the condition of his buildings after a few years and to obtain letters of reference. He was repeatedly confirmed that his reservoirs had survived temperatures below minus 20 ° C undamaged.

Bridge at Chazelet Castle, built by Joseph Monier in 1875

After building water tanks at Chazelet Castle near Saint-Benoît-du-Sault , Indre , the Marquis de Tillière commissioned him in 1875 to build a 16.50 m long and 4.25 m wide bridge over the moat, the first Reinforced concrete bridge in the world, but which gave the impression of being made of wood ( 46 ° 30 ′ 27.3 ″  N , 1 ° 26 ′ 26.2 ″  E ).

At that time he also built a concrete staircase to his office above the workshop, which he also patented.

While his previous patents were formally additional patents to the first patent, which had existed since 1867, in 1878 he received a new, independent patent for concrete sleepers (patent no. 120 989), which was then expanded to include various concrete beams with iron reinforcement. For the first time, this patent contained the clear statement that the cement protects the iron from rust and is considered to be the fundamental patent for reinforced concrete construction.

As the communities expanded their water and sewer networks, the demand for water containers decreased. Monier therefore had to look for its customers further and further away from urban centers. In 1886 he had his idea protected to simplify the construction of houses with prefabricated concrete slabs. He described this house as earthquake-proof and resistant to ice, moisture, heat and fire. While executing a contract for such a house in Nice , his second son Paul died on November 24, 1887 as a result of falling from the scaffolding. Since his first son Pierre had broken off his relationship with his father some time before because of a family dispute, Joseph Monier suddenly found himself in his business at the age of 64 without a successor and without active support. He therefore had to file for bankruptcy in June 1888. In 1890, however, he founded a new company, L'Entreprise générale de travaux en ciment J Monier . With this company he built a spiral staircase with 140 steps made of reinforced concrete in the donjon of the castle Blandy-les-Tours ( 48 ° 34 ′ 1.6 ″  N , 2 ° 46 ′ 54.6 ″  E ) on the basis of his staircase patent . In 1889 he had a patent issued for pipes for telephone and power lines.

Reservoir in Clamart

Around this time Monier carried out his last known project, a water reservoir for the Maison de retraite Ferrari retirement home in Clamart , donated by Marie de Ferrari, Duchess of Galliera. The tank designed by the architect Prosper Bobin is 10 m high and 8 m in diameter; the bottom of the tank is 8 cm thick, its top 5 cm. The reservoir is still in place ( 48 ° 47 '51.3 "  N , 2 ° 15' 41.8"  E ).

After that, he largely withdrew from business life, but could hardly defend himself against the demands of creditors and the tax authorities, who said that he must have high income from his various patents. In fact, he is said to have had a total of only 200,000 francs license income in the thirty years and was penniless in his retirement. In 1902, several foreign companies petitioned the French President that Joseph Monier, the inventor of reinforced concrete , should receive a state pension, and began a fundraising campaign. Later it was suggested that Monier should be given permission to run a state tobacco shop. Monier thanked the magazine Le Ciment for this support . He died on March 13, 1906 and was buried in the Billancourt parish cemetery.

international Developement

In 1879 Joseph Monier applied for a patent for Austria and in 1880 granted a license to R. Schuster. In the same year he signed a protocol for Russia and granted licensing rights for Belgium and Holland. In 1881 he applied for a patent for Germany.

In 1884 Joseph Monier received a visit from Conrad Freytag , his brother-in-law and partner Carl Heidschuch and the entrepreneur Josseaux from Offenbach am Main , who ran the Martenstein & Jousseaux company there. Freytag acquired the rights for southern Germany together with a right of first refusal on the rights for northern Germany. Josseaux acquired the rights for the Frankfurt area. He spoke about it in 1885 with Gustav Adolf Wayss , an entrepreneur from Frankfurt am Main , whereupon Freytag in 1885 ceded the right of first refusal for northern Germany free of charge to Wayss, who relocated his company to Berlin for better marketing. In the following years, Wayss founded the Actien-Gesellschaft für Monierbauten, formerly GA Wayss & Co. , later Beton- und Monierbau AG , together with the Berlin government builder Mathias Koenen , and acquired license rights for East Germany as well. Together with Freytag he founded Wayss & Freytag .

While Joseph Monier had created his buildings solely on an empirical basis, Wayss and Koenen began with experiments on two 4.5 m long arches with an arrow height of 45 cm. Koenen was probably the first to recognize that steel and concrete have practically the same coefficients of expansion and wrote an initial theoretical study of compression and tension in reinforced concrete. In 1887 Wayss published the treatise Das System Monier (iron framework with cement coating), which probably also went back to Koenen, in its application to the entire construction industry , which became the basis for the further development of reinforced concrete. In the following four years, a total of 320 reinforced concrete bridges are said to have been built in Germany and Austria.

The commercial production of ceilings and walls, in which a metal framework, wire mesh or wire mesh is used, as an interference with the patents of the Carl Rabitz company, was prohibited by a preliminary injunction of the royal Prussian regional court . However, this ruling was soon revoked by the Royal Court of Appeal without any restriction. From attempts to improve the Rabitz system and the development of the plastering mortar carrier up to the invention of the Stauss brick fabric by the Stauss brothers (see Putzträger ) in 1889, it only took three years.

Monier's invention of reinforced concrete made many modern structures such as bridges and high-rise buildings possible in the first place.

Patents

Joseph Monier received the following patents in France:

Number of the patent	date	title
n ° 77 165	July 16, 1867	System of mobile container boxes made of iron and cement for horticulture. Système de caisses-basins mobiles en fer et ciment applicables à l'horticulture
n ° 77 165 addendum	04th July 1868	Procedure for pipes Procédé pour des tuyaux
n ° 77 165 addendum	September 19, 1868	Procedure for fixed immovable water tanks made of cement and iron for garden irrigation Procédé pour des bassins fixes et immobiles en ciment et fer pour retenir l'eau des jardins
n ° 77 165 addendum	0September 2, 1869	Process for movable and immovable panels for house facades, etc. Procédé pour des panneaux, mobiles et immobiles, servant à la clôture des maisons, etc.
n ° 77 165 addendum	August 13, 1873	Device for the construction of bridges and footbridges of all sizes Application à la construction des ponts et passerelles de toutes dimensions
n ° 77 165 addendum	March 16, 1875	System for building boxes and coffins ... Système de construction de caisses et cercueils ...
n ° 77 165 addendum	July 26, 1875	System for building stairs Système de construction d'escaliers
n ° 120 989	0November 3, 1877	System of sleepers and girders made of cement and iron for roads, paths and railways Système de traverses et supports en ciment et fer applicables aux voies, chemins ferrés et non ferrés
n ° 120 989 addition	June 27, 1878	Device for the construction of water and sewer pipes Application à la construction d'égouts et aqueducs
n ° 120 989 addition	August 14, 1878	Device for building beams of different sizes for bridges and footbridges Application à la construction de poutres, poutrelles pour ponts, passerelles
n ° 120 989 addition	January 30, 1880	Modification and improvement of the system relating to the implementation of the said thresholds (connections) Modification, perfectionnement du système dans la manière d'exécuter lesdites traverses (ligatures)
n ° 135 590	March 15, 1880	System of barrels and containers made of cement and iron for all areas of industry as containers for all types of liquids such as water, wine, beer, cider, oil, etc. Systèmes de cuves, récipients en ciment et fer applicables à tous genres d'industrie pour contenir tous liquides tels que eaux, vins, bières, cidres, huiles, etc.
n ° 135 590 addition	0August 3, 1880	Application of this system to the production of plaster and cement and iron coatings for all types of surfaces, be they flat, inclined, vertical, horizontal or any other application de ce système à la construction d'enduits, revêtements en ciment et fer s'appliquant à tous genres de surfaces, planes, inclinées, verticales, horizontales ou autres
n ° 135 590 addition	04th August 1880	Application of this system to the production of drinking troughs, feed troughs, vases, flower bowls, boxes and stands, etc. Application de ce système à la construction d'abreuvoirs, mangeoires, vases, bacs à fleurs, jardinières, etc.
n ° 120 989 addition	0March 2, 1881	Application of this system to the production of straight or curved plates in iron and cement Application de ce système à la construction de planchers droits ou cintrés hourdés en fer et ciment
n ° 170 798	August 24, 1885	System of pipes and conduits made of cement and iron Systèmes de tuyaux, conduits en ciment et fer
n ° 170 798 addendum	December 24, 1885	Improvement of the pipe production system Perfectionnement au système de constructions de tuyaux (ligatures)
n ° 175 513	April 15, 1886	System for the construction of solid or portable, hygienic and economical houses from cement and iron Système de constructions de maisons fixes ou portatives, hygiéniques et économiques, en ciment et fer
n ° 213 013	April 24, 1891	System for the production of cable ducts in cement and single or double -layer iron for telegraph and power lines Système de construction en ciment et fer à simple et double ligature, des caniveaux pour fils télégraphiques et électriques

See also

• Reinforcement bars

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The information in this article is based largely on the work of Jean Louis Bosc et al. a .: Joseph Monier et la naissance du ciment armé . Paris, Éd. du Linteau, 2001, which apparently also formed the basis of the articles in French and English Wikipedia.
2. ↑ Joseph-Louis Lambot had already made a boat out of iron-reinforced cement in 1850; the Englishman Wilkinson acquired the first reinforced concrete patent before Monet, cf. Publication No. 1/1950 by the Department of Building Construction, Prof. Dr. Merinsky, TH Vienna
3. ↑ Saint-Quentin only received the addition of La Poterie - pottery - in 1886
4. ↑ The reservoir is located on Rue de l'Ouest in the walled garden of the Maison de Retraite Ferrari of the Brignole - Galliera Foundation .
5. ↑ History - 1884 on the Wayss & Freytag Ingenieurbau website
6. ↑ Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, September 4, 1886, p. 366
7. ↑ Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung of November 20, 1886, p. 462
8. ↑ List from Joseph Monier et la naissance du ciment armé

literature

in alphabetical order by authors / editors

• Actien-Gesellschaft für Monier-Bauten vorm. GA Wayss & Co .; Abth. Bridges, culverts and tunnels (ed.): The Monier construction method DR-Pat. ; (Iron framework with cement coating) . Berlin 1891. Digital version of the SLUB Dresden via EOD .
• F. Baravalle-Brackenburg: Stauss brick fabric. Shaping and constructive element in construction . Rudolf Bohmann industry and specialist publisher, Vienna 1953.
• Jean Louis Bosc et al. a .: Joseph Monier et la naissance du ciment armé . Ed. du Linteau, Paris 2001.
• Karl-Eugen Kurrer : On the early history of reinforced concrete construction in Germany - 100 years of Monier brochure , concrete and reinforced concrete construction , volume 83, 1988, issue 1, pp. 6-12
• Ferdinand Werner : The long way to new building . Volume 1: Concrete: 43 men invent the future . Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, Worms 2016. ISBN 978-3-88462-372-5 , pp. 154–162.

Web links

Commons : Joseph Monier  - collection of images, videos and audio files