Paul Christophe

Following his studies at the School of Engineering in Ghent, Christophe worked from 1892 onwards as a civil servant in the Belgian road- and bridge-building authority, part of the Brussels Ministry of Public Works. At the start of his career in the civil service, he supervised the building of a number of large bridges in Liège and was quickly promoted to the post of vice-secretary of the Central Committee for Public Works in Brussels, where in 1898 he was entrusted with the experimental testing of bridges, “which gave him the chance to carry out much scientific work” [Emperger, 1905/3, p. 1]. For example, together with A. Lambin he published an analysis of the loadbearing behaviour of Vierendeel’s steel bridge in Tervueren in the journal Annales des Travaux publics de Belgique [Lambin & Christophe, 1898]. One year later, he was dispatched to the international congress on reinforced concrete that Hennebique had organised on the occasion of the Paris World Exposition (1900)  for which he carried out careful preliminary studies. Later that year, the journal Annales des Travaux publics de Belgique published his lengthy report [Christophe, 1899], which shortly afterwards appeared as a monograph with the title Le béton armé et ses applications [Christophe, 1902]. At that time, the book was acknowledged “as the best-known and the best compendium in this field”, and its translation into several languages, e. g. Russian (1903), German [Christophe, 1905], “made certainly the most important contribution to ensuring that reinforced concrete became as widespread as it is today” [Emperger, 1905/3, p. 2]. In the book, Christophe develops a design theory for reinforced concrete based on experiments, a theory that Mörsch published in his book in 1902 and was soon to become the standard method of design. So Christophe chose a design method that relied neither on hard-to swallow theories nor on unacceptable rules of thumb à la Hennebique. Working at the Brussels Ministry of Public Works, Christophe rose from Ingénieur to Ingénieur Principal and finally to Directeur Général des Ponts et Chaussées.

Main contributions to structural analysis:

Le pont Vierendeel. Rapport sur les essais jusqu’à la rupture effectués au parc de Tervueren, par M. Vierendeel, sur un pont métallique de 31^m.50 de portée avec poutres à arcades de son système [1898]; Le béton armé et ses applications [1899 & 1902]; Der Eisenbeton und seine Anwendung im Bauwesen [1905]

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. 721