Rudolf Eduard Schinz

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Rudolf Eduard Schinz (born April 17, 1812 in Zurich , Switzerland ; † October 8, 1855 in Dirschau , Kingdom of Prussia ) was a Swiss railway engineer .

Life

After finishing school at the high school in Zurich and with a pedagogue in the canton of Glarus , Schinz completed a nine-month training course at the newly established industrial school in Zurich. In 1830 he attended a one-year preparatory course for the École polytechnique at the Collège royal de Bourbon in Paris , which he then attended as an external student until 1833, since the boarding school only accepted French at the time. There he heard lectures from Navier and Clapeyron, among others .

In 1833 he returned to Zurich, where he developed new projects, partly in conjunction with Clapeyron. He gained recognition with the design of another bridge over the Limmat and a large suspension bridge . At the beginning of 1835 he was commissioned to demolish the city's fortifications. This included the construction of new streets, the planning of entire city districts and the regulation of bodies of water.

The construction of the Paris – Versailles railroad brought him back to Paris. In 1838 he moved to Colmar to build the Basel – Strasbourg railway . In 1844 he entered Prussian service. Until 1849 he was busy building the Cologne – Mindener railway . He introduced various improvements to machines and invented a new pressure gauge whose basic idea of ​​a Bourdon tube was then exploited by Eugène Bourdon in Paris

In 1850 Lentze succeeded in bringing him to Dirschau for the construction of the Vistula and Nogat bridges for the Prussian Eastern Railway . There he was head of the technical bureau of the commission . His tasks included setting up the workplaces, including machines and auxiliary devices for erecting the iron superstructures. This included e.g. B. also the construction and operation of our own brick factory and extensive tests on the strength of the iron including the calculation of the resulting dimensions of the lattice girder bridges . The structural development and the static calculation of the bridges was essentially carried out by him. His idea of ​​combining the superstructure of two openings to form a continuous beam led to significant savings.

His calculations were almost complete and a third of the superstructure of the Vistula Bridge was installed when he died of a stroke on October 8, 1855 . He is buried in the Dirschau cemetery, where a memorial was erected for him.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Schinz steam manometer for locomotives. In: Polytechnisches Journal . 113, 1849, pp. 85-90.
  2. ^ Karl-Eugen Kurrer : History of structural analysis: In search of balance . 2nd Edition. Ernst & Sohn , Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-433-60750-3 , p. 75 .
  3. ^ Karl-Eugen Kurrer: The History of the Theory of Structures: From Arch Analysis to Computational Mechanics . Ernst & Sohn, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-433-01838-5 , pp. 80 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  4. ↑ Mehrtens, who quotes the inscription on the monument, writes his first name Rudolph
personal data
SURNAME Schinz, Rudolf Eduard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss railway engineer
DATE OF BIRTH April 17, 1812
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich , Switzerland
DATE OF DEATH October 8, 1855
Place of death Dirschau , Kingdom of Prussia