Do you want to know the origin of reinforced concrete?

In Poyatos, we like to keep our customers informed and that is why from our concrete block machines manufacturer, we want to take a little trip through the history of reinforced concrete.

And, for this, we will take the article as a source of information. Do you know what was the first invention in reinforced concrete? By José Antonio Agudelo Zapata on structuring.net. In this way, in the article we read:

The invention of reinforced concrete is usually attributed to the builder William Wilkinson, who applied for a patent in 1854 on a system that included iron reinforcement for "the improvement of the construction of houses, warehouses and other fire-resistant buildings." However, a few months later the first invention made exclusively of reinforced concrete was patented. And this invention may baffle you a bit.

It was the Frenchman Joseph-Louis Lambot who, after performing several tests with mortar and steel bars and chicken coop to build small water tanks and drinking fountains, builds and patents the first invention made of reinforced concrete, which he presented at the Universal Exhibition from Paris in 1855. It was a small reinforced concrete boat.

Barges made concrete products

So although we can think that this invention did not have much significance in the history of concrete, it is possible to say that it did. Since from the presentation of the French, "the reinforced concrete barges sailed regularly through the canals of Europe, and as the end of the century approached, an Italian engineer managed to build the first ship with this material."

And, although at first glance we can think of the little logic of making use of this material on ships, the truth that was quite successful at the beginning of the 20th century.

And it was mainly due to the fact that during World War I and II there was a shortage of steel for the construction of ships as well as the use of cheaper material, such as reinforced concrete, it became a useful practice for transport and war ships.

In the First World War, for example, the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, in view of the shortage of steel, approved the creation of the Emergency Fleet Corporation program that provided for the construction of 24 concrete ships for war. However, when the war ended in November 1918, only 12 of these ships were under construction and none had been terminated. They were finally finished but were soon sold to private companies.

Around here in Spain we also had our reinforced concrete ship, the Mirotres, built in 1918.

In the Second World War, the steel was scarce again, and the concrete ships returned to the sea.

To give you an idea, the largest concrete vessel ever built was the SS Selma, an impressive 130-meter-long tanker opened in 1919. Today its remains lie partially sunk in Galveston Bay, in Texas Gulf Coast, Houston.

The construction of concrete ships even became industrialized “to the point of using prefabricated concrete elements that were finally coupled in the shipyards.” But this use was gradually disappearing because this type of ships required a much more hull thick than those made of steel.

First uses of reinforced concrete

And what were the first uses outside of this first great invention? Well, this time we go to this article: Brief introduction to the origins of reinforced concrete from Interempresas.net and read:

It was the Romans who used large-scale concrete in works such as the Colosseum (in its foundation and internal walls) and the Pantheon, built in the 80s and 120 A.D. in Rome, or on the Alcántara bridge, in Hispania, from 104 to 106 A.D.

To which we can add:

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the use of concrete declines until, in the second half of the eighteenth century it is reused in France and England. Thus, in 1758, engineer John Smeaton devised a new mortar when rebuilding the Eddyston lighthouse on the Cornish coast. In this work a mortar was used adding a pozzolana to a limestone with a high proportion of clay. This mortar behaved well against the action of seawater due to the presence of clay in the limes, even allowing it to set under water, remaining insoluble once hardened.

In this way, we can see that from the first uses of concrete, until today, in which companies such as Poyatos appear, we are specialized in offering integral solutions. We design and manufacture under our own patent all the concrete  blocks machine, and the different machinery for concrete plants and for special finishing of Concrete slabs.