Kurt Beyer

Kurt Beyer completed his civil engineering studies at Dresden TH in 1905. His dissertation, supervised by Georg Christoph Mehrtens, concerned the optimisation of bridge systems. Afterwards, he was employed for several years as a section engineer for the Siamese State Railways, which came to an end with the outbreak of World War 1. In 1919 he was appointed to the newly created professorship of theory of structures and applied mechanics for civil engineers at Dresden TH. His monograph Statik im Eisenbetonbau (1927), which was later reprinted more than once in considerably expanded editions under the title of Statik im Stahlbetonbau, became the most important standard work in the German language during the consolidation period of structural theory and influenced many engineers outside Germany as well. Besides the “Beyer Bible”, as his work is often called, he published – together with Heinrich Spangenberg – the third, revised edition of Otto Mohr's Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der Technischen Mechanik.Without doubt, Beyer is, after Mohr, the most important advocate of the Dresden school of applied mechanics. As a consulting engineer, he devoted much of his time to structures for open-cast lignite mining (e. g. conveyor bridges), steel buildings, bridges and steel hydraulic structures. After the founding of the German Democratic Republic in 1949, his work on the theory of civil engineering was honoured by his appointments to several academies, including the German Academy of Sciences.

Main Contributions to Structural Analysis

• Eigengewicht, günstige Grundmaße und geschichtliche Entwicklung des Auslegerträgers [1908];
• Die Statik im Eisenbetonbau [1927];
• Die Statik im Stahlbetonbau [1956]

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. 717

Participation in the following structures & large-scale projects:

• Flügelwegbrücke