It's such a common material and used so often that most engineers don't think about it in any depth. For most of us, it is just a material that has to meet the required parameters in various shapes. But when working with it, have you ever wondered what country it came from? Or what is the history of a material without which many world-famous buildings would never have been built in the first place?
For this article, let us put aside complex engineering problems, design and structural assessments, load analysis, and the application of standards. Let's take a short trip into history together and see where this material comes from, its origins and how it developed giving rise to an incredible amount of purposeful and admirable buildings.
As the name suggests, early reinforced concrete comprised of two essential components: iron and concrete. Before we discuss reinforced concrete itself, let's take a quick look at concrete. This has been known to humankind for more than 2000 years.
The benefits of concrete have been used by Romans (some say Egyptians) already. Some of the buildings they built using it are still standing today. An excellent example is the worlds largest monolithic dome on the Pantheon in Rome (image below), which was built using cast-in-place concrete technology in the second century AD. This is not the only example of early adoption of concrete: there are many similar structures in the world.
It is therefore surprising that the idea of reinforcing concrete with iron elements did not appear until the nineteenth century. With some exaggeration, this period can be called the period of the Technical Renaissance. In addition to reinforced concrete, the use of steel also revolutionized construction. It began to appear on a wider scale in the form of load-bearing elements only a short time before reinforced concrete itself.
In the 19th century, several pioneers experimented with reinforced concrete. Among the earliest and most important was the Englishman William Boutland Wilkinson, who experimented with fireproofing solutions in the construction of buildings. In 1854, he used steel rods and ropes to reinforce the concrete in constructing a house for his servants. He patented a solution that proved successful.
Another pioneer was the French industrialist François Coignet, the first to construct a four-story building made entirely of reinforced concrete in the French town of Saint-Denis in 1853. He also patented his solution in 1855.
