Carl Culmann

After attending Wissembourg Collège (1835–36) he moved to Metz, where his uncle, Friedrich Jakob Culmann (1787–1849), was a professor at the Artillery School; this awakened in him an interest in a career in engineering. From 1838 to 1841 he studied at Karlsruhe Polytechnic and was subsequently employed on public building works by Bavarian State Railways until 1855. With the help of his superior, Friedrich August von Pauli (1802–83), Culmann spent the years 1849–51 abroad in England, Ireland and the USA; his experiences were published in two travelogues which contain the theory of frameworks. After leaving Bavarian State Railways, he became full professor of engineering sciences at Zurich ETH, where he gave lectures on graphical statics from 1860 onwards; he gained his doctorate there in 1880. Culmann placed graphical statics on a sound footing and made a great contribution to the establishment phase of structural theory. Although his reasoning behind graphical statics was in the end rendered obsolete by projective geometry, together with Mohr he was the greatest structural engineer of the 19th century in the German-speaking world.

Main contributions to structural analysis:

• Der Bau der hölzernen Brücken in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika [1851];
• Der Bau der eisernen Brücken in England und Amerika [1852];
• Die graphische Statik [1864 & 1866]. 

Source: Kurrer, Karl-Eugen The History of the Theory of Structures, Wilhelm Ernst & Sohn Verlag für Architektur und technische Wissenschaften GmbH, Berlin (Deutschland), ISBN 3-433-01838-3, 2008; p. 724