Paul Christophe (civil engineer)

Paul Isidore Armand Christophe (born July 25, 1870 in Verviers , † June 11, 1957 in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode , Brussels ) was a Belgian civil engineer.

Christophe studied civil engineering at the University of Ghent with his degree in 1892 and was employed in the Belgian road and bridge administration. He began in Liège (Service special de la Meuse) and in 1897 came to the Committee of the Central Administration for Bridges and Roads in Brussels (Comité permanent de l'Administration centrale des Ponts et Chaussées), where he was until 1907. From 1898 he was entrusted with tests for bridge construction (as director of the Service des Essais de Ponts ), for example by Vierendeel girders . In the run-up to the Paris World's Fair in 1900, he prepared a detailed report on reinforced concrete, which was the first monograph on the subject. Most of the initiative came from himself. The book has also been translated into German and Russian. He gave design methods based on his experimental work. He built on the work of other pioneers (such as Edmond Coignet and Napoléon de Tédesco , who published the first French design approaches for reinforced concrete in 1894). He became chief engineer in his post in Brussels (1892) and finally in 1933 general inspector for roads and bridges in Belgium. In 1935 he retired.

For his work on reinforced concrete he received the Charles Lemaire Prize of the Belgian Academy of Sciences in 1901, as he had before in 1893 for a work on hydraulic engineering. He carried out load tests on the reinforced concrete bridge over the Maas in Rouillon in 1907 (and a number of other reinforced concrete bridges). In 1919 he became head of a department for the study of bridges. Originally he meant to be able to promote the construction of more reinforced concrete bridges, but they mainly studied steel bridges. Much of the work was done to clean up the destruction of World War I, and many of the bridges built at the time did not survive World War II. He was also responsible for road construction and advocated motorways in Belgium as early as 1935.

He was in correspondence with Friedrich Ignaz von Emperger . Although he had contacts with the building contractor and reinforced concrete pioneer (with his own reinforced concrete system) François Hennebique , he never worked for him (as was sometimes falsely claimed in the literature).

Fonts

• Le béton armé et ses applications, Annales des Travaux publics de Belgique, volume. 56, 1899, pp. 429-538, 647-678, 961-1124, 2nd edition Paris, Liège, Librairie Polytechnique, C. Béranger 1902
  • German translation: Reinforced concrete and its use in construction, Berlin: Verlag Tonindustrie-Zeitung 1905

literature

• Karl-Eugen Kurrer : The History of the Theory of Structures. Searching for Equilibrium , Ernst & Sohn , 2018, p. 686ff and p. 979f (biography), ISBN 978-3-433-03229-9
• Armande Hellebois, Bernard Espion: The role of the Belgian engineer Paul Christophe on the development of reinforced concrete at the turn of the 20th century , Beton- und Eisenbetonbau, Volume 108, 2013, pp. 888-897
• Thomas Jürges, The Development of Bending, Shear and Deformation Design in Concrete and Reinforced Concrete Construction and its Application in Structural Science, Dissertation, RWTH Aachen 2000

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Article by Hellebois, Espion zu Christophe, see literature