Joseph Monier

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Joseph Monier

Joseph Monier (November 8, 1823, Saint-Quentin-de-Poterie, France—March 13, 1906, Paris) was a French gardener and one of the principal inventors of reinforced concrete.

As a gardener, Monier was not satisfied with the materials available for making flowerpots. Clay was easily broken and wood weathered badly and could be broken by the plant roots. Monier began making cement pots and tubs, but these were not stable enough. In order to strengthen the cement containers, he experimented with embedded iron mesh. He was not the first to experiment with reinforced concrete, but he saw some of the possibilities in the technique, and promoted it extensively.

Monier exhibited his invention at the Paris Exposition of 1867. He obtained his first patent on July 16, 1867, on iron-reinforced troughs for horticulture. He continued to find new uses for the material, and obtained more patents — iron-reinforced cement pipes and basins (1868); iron-reinforced cement panels for building façades (1869); bridges made of iron-reinforced cement (1873); reinforced concrete beams (1878). In 1875 the first iron-reinforced cement bridge ever built was constructed at the Castle of Chazelet. Monier was the designer.

The important point of Monier's idea was that it combined steel and concrete in such a way that the best qualities of each material were brought into play. Concrete is easily procured and shaped. It has considerable compressive or crushing strength, but is somewhat deficient in shearing strength, and distinctly weak in tensile or pulling strength. Steel, on the other hand, is easily procurable in simple forms such as long bars, and is extremely strong. But it is difficult and expensive to work up into customized forms. Concrete had been avoided for making beams, slabs and thin walls because its lack of tensile strength doomed it to fail in such circumstances. But if a concrete slab is reinforced with a network of small steel rods on its undersurface where the tensile stresses occur, its strength will be enormously increased.

François Hennébique saw Monier's reinforced concrete tubs and tanks at the Paris Exposition and began experimenting with ways to apply this new material to building construction. He set up his own firm the same year and in 1892 he patented a complete building system using the material.^[1]

In 1886 German engineer Gustav Adolf Wayss (1851-1917) bought Monier's patent and developed it further. He conducted further research in the use of reinforced concrete as a building material, and established the firm of Wayss & Freytag.

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This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition article "Concrete (Material)", a publication now in the public domain.
(French) Bosc, J.-L. Joseph Monier et la naissance du ciment armé, Editions du Linteau, Paris, ISBN 2-910342-20-4, 2001.
(Italian) Iori, Tullia. Il cemento armato in Italia dalle origini alla seconda guerra mondiale, Edilstampa, Roma, 2001.
(German) Marrey, B. "Wissen Sie, was ein Moniereisen ist? Joseph Monier zum 100. Todestag", in Beton- und Stahlbetonbau, June 2006, n. 6 v. 101.