Josef Melan

   

  • civil and structural engineer

    Josef Melan

  • Date of birth

    18. 11. 1852 Vienna

  • Date of death

    10. 2. 1941 Prague
He studied civil engineering at Vienna University of Technology from 1869 and remained there as a private lecturer on the theory of bridge and railway engineering until 1886, when he was offered a professorship by Brno University of Technology. In 1902, he accepted an invitation from the German Technical University in Prague, where he worked until 1930. While still in Vienna, he began to pursue static deformation calculations of large suspension bridges, enabling them to be designed more economically. He published the calculations in 1888. His fellow student Gustav Lindenthal subsequently commissioned him to recalculate the design of the Williamsburg Bridge in New York, the largest suspension bridge in the world at the time. In 1888, Melan was also approached by the engineer Victor Brausewetter, who, together with the cement manufacturer Adolf Pittel, founded a construction company, Pittel & Brausewetter, and subsequently initiated the formation of an association that carried out comparative load tests on various vault structures: from masonry structures made of plain concrete to those made of reinforced concrete. These were built in Austria as early as from 1886 by Gustav Adolf Waysse's company based on Monier's patent, i.e. reinforced in both directions with steel mesh. However, Josef Melan, who studied the tests, made it known that he "did not trust those wires". In 1892, he presented his own structural system based on rigid longitudinal reinforcement of the vaults: bent L-beams for smaller ones, and truss girders for larger ones. Thanks to their greater load-bearing capacity, they were soon used as ceilings in warehouse and factory buildings, as well as for roofing in large halls and industrial facilities. A significant advantage was the possibility to suspend the formwork from the reinforcement and to concrete bridge arches without the use of lining rings. Pittel & Brausewetter tested it from 1893–1895 on smaller buildings, none of which survive today. Melan's student Fritz Emperger was more daring: in 1893, he founded Melan Arch Construction Company in New York, which designed and built two bridges of this kind in Rock Rapids (IA) and Cincinnati (OH) during the following year, and twenty-seven more by the end of the century. The largest, built between 1896 and 1897 over the Kansas River in Topeka (KS), had five 30-metre arches. European technical experts were not convinced of the advantages of this construction until Josef Melan designed a bridge in 1896, which was built under the personal direction of Victor Brausewetter in 1898. He crossed an arm of the river of the same name in the Upper Austrian city of Steyr with a three-arched arc with a span of 42.4 metres and an extremely low camber of 1:16. Probably the oldest reinforced concrete bridge in the Czech lands, designed by Josef Melan in the shape of the original medieval bridge over the moat of Veveří Castle, dates back to the same year. During 1901, Melan's "elegant city bridge" in Ljubljana was completed, with façades consisting of exposed concrete combined with bronze cladding designed by the Dalmatian architect Jurij Zaninović. At the same time, Melan won a public tender for a road bridge over the valley between the Chauderon and Montbenon districts in Lausanne. In 1912, he designed a reinforced concrete bridge at Le Sépey in the south of Switzerland. Melan's academic work in Prague resulted in the unprecedented development of the local branch of Pittel & Brausewetter, whose design office gradually filled up with his students. Between 1908 and 1912, it was mainly Konrad Kluge (1878–1945) who – "usually in agreement with the inventor" – designed typical Melan-style bridges with rigid arches, reinforced with L-beams: in Debrny, in Jihlava, near the (now lost) village of Přísečnice, near Česká Třebová, and in Oloví. Josef Melan, however, did not give up his engineering practice, even in his later years. In July 1928, he designed a steel arch bridge in Ústí nad Labem based on a proposal by Ernst Krob, the head of the city's Building Authority, which was built from 1934–1936.



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