The Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced
Concrete Design, by Edward Godfrey

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Title: Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design
American Society of Civil Engineers, Transactions, Paper
No. 1169, Volume LXX, Dec. 1910

Author: Edward Godfrey

Release Date: November 23, 2005 [EBook #17137]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CIVIL ENGINEERS INSTITUTED 1852

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 existe