TRANSACTIONS

Paper No. 1169

Some mooted questions in reinforced concrete design.[A]

By Edward Godfrey, M. Am.  Soc.  C. E.

With discussion by Messrs.  Joseph Wright, S. Bent Russell, J.R. 
Worcester, L.J.  Mensch, Walter W. Clifford, J.C.  Meem, George H. Myers,
Edwin Thacher, C.A.P.  Turner, Paul Chapman, E.P.  Goodrich, Albin H.
Beyer, John C. Ostrup, Harry F. Porter, John Stephen Sewell, Sanford E.
Thompson, and Edward Godfrey.

Not many years ago physicians had certain rules and practices by which they were guided as to when and where to bleed a patient in order to relieve or cure him.  What of those rules and practices to-day?  If they were logical, why have they been abandoned?

It is the purpose of this paper to show that reinforced concrete engineers have certain rules and practices which are no more logical than those governing the blood-letting of former days.  If the writer fails in this, by reason of the more weighty arguments on the other side of the questions he propounds, he will at least have brought out good reasons which will stand the test of logic for the rules and practices which he proposes to condemn, and which, at the present time, are quite lacking in the voluminous literature on this comparatively new subject.

Destructive criticism has recently been decried in an editorial in an engineering journal.  Some kinds of destructive criticism are of the highest benefit; when it succeeds in destroying error, it is reconstructive.  No reform was ever accomplished without it, and no reformer ever existed who was not a destructive critic.  If showing up errors and faults is destructive criticism, we cannot have too much of it; in fact, we cannot advance without it.  If engineering practice is to be purged of its inconsistencies and absurdities, it will never be done by dwelling on its excellencies.

Reinforced concrete engineering has fairly leaped into prominence and apparently into full growth, but it still wears some of its swaddling-bands.  Some of the garments which it borrowed from sister forms of construction in its short infancy still cling to it, and, while these were, perhaps, the best makeshifts under the circumstances, they fit badly and should be discarded.  It is some of these misfits and absurdities which the writer would like to bring prominently before the Engineering Profession.

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