Napoleon de Tédesco

Napoléon de Tédesco (* 1848 in Paris ; † 1922 ) was a French civil engineer and one of the pioneers of reinforced concrete .

biography

His family had Italian origins. He went to the École Centrale Paris in Paris and studied civil engineering there, interrupted by participating in the Franco-Prussian War (he was a prisoner, but was able to escape). In 1872 he graduated as an engineer and worked in Turkey, Bulgaria and Spain. From 1883 he worked for the Hersent company and in 1887 he went into business for himself. In 1890 he began working with Coignet on reinforced concrete with Edmond Coignet in Paris. Both published the first design recommendations for reinforced concrete in France in 1894 in a report for the Société des Ingénieurs Civils de France. The report was backed up by experiments, but the measurement was flawed, which earned them ridicule. They set the lever arm for the concrete compressive force too low at half the height of the concrete compression zone instead of two thirds and found a deflection that was three times higher than in the experiments, which they stated openly and which was corrected soon afterwards. This was also the first published calculation of the deflection in reinforced concrete (based on Friedrich Ignaz von Emperger ). The corrected version of their design later became standard (in Germany in DIN 1045 to 1971). In the first book on reinforced concrete by Paul Christophe (1899, 1902), the design was essentially adopted.

At the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900 he and Coignet presented, among other things, an underground passage of 2,400 m in length. At the same time, a reinforced concrete passage collapsed (passage across avenue de Suffren to the Globe Céleste , with 9 dead and many injured), which led to the formation of a French reinforced concrete commission in 1900 to draw up recommendations ( general rapporteur Armand Considère ). Tedesco was also initially heard, but later discredited (he was the designer according to the Matra system), which damaged his reputation. At the later trial, the city of Paris was blamed for having tolerated construction work for a construction pit too close to the passage.

He also translated engineering literature from Italian and English (not only on civil engineering, but also on diesel engines and electricity). From 1896 he took over the publication of the cement industry magazine Le ciment . From 1908 to 1914 he was the editor of the magazine Le ciment armé , in which reinforced concrete was scientifically debated. He also published a book based on the articles ( Calcul des ouvrages en béton, en ciment armé , 1911).

Fonts

• with Edmond Coignet: Du calcul des ouvrages en ciment avec ossature métallique. In: Mémoires de la Société des ingénieurs civils de France , 1894, pp. 282-363 ( online ).
• Recueil de types de ponts pour routes en ciment armé , Paris: C. Béranger 1907
• with Victor Forestier: Manuel théorique et pratique du constructeur en ciment armé. Avec une note sur le calcul des arcs , Librairie Polytechnique, Ch.Béranger, 1909
• Calcul du ciment armé sans formules algébriques, Paris 1921, 2nd edition, Paris: Editions du "Constructeur de ciment armé", 1929 (revised by Auguste Liévin)

literature

• Bernard Marrey, Les ponts modern. 20e siècle, Picard éditeur, Paris, 1995
• Antoine Picon (ed.): L'art de l'ingénieur: Constructeur, entrepreneur, inventeur, Editions du Center Pompidou (in collaboration with Le Moniteur) 1999
• Thomas Jürges, The development of bending, shear and deformation design in reinforced concrete construction and its application in structural theory, dissertation, RWTH Aachen 2000, pdf

Individual evidence

1. ^ Catalog of the French National Library
2. ↑ Jürges, dissertation RWTH Aachen 2000, p. 35, s. literature
3. ^ A collection of biographies. The occasion was the exhibition of the same name in the Center Pompidou in 1997