Eugène Freyssinet was a French structural and civil engineer. He was the major pioneer of prestressed concrete.
Freyssinet was born in Objat, Corrèze, France. Newly graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, two of France’s most iconic engineering schools, the young Eugène Freyssinet began his career as a highways engineer. It was 1905 and he was 26 years old. Passionate about concrete and its applications, Eugène Freyssinet constantly applied the principles he had learned during his studies. Through the various construction projects he was involved in, he discovered in detail the properties (strength, creep, ductility, etc.) of this fantastic building material. The prestressing technique was devised to overcome difficulties in executing curved shapes in reinforced concrete.
Appointed bridge and highway engineer at Moulins in 1905, Freyssinet designed and built many reinforced-concrete bridges, including one with a 300-foot (91-metre) span. From the end of World War I until 1928 he worked for a contracting firm, and in 1930 he completed the Plougastel Bridge across the Elorn River at Brest. With three 612-foot (187-metre) spans, this was the largest reinforced-concrete bridge constructed up to that time.
After 1928 Freyssinet devoted himself to the development of pre-stressed concrete and also to the manufacture of high-strength concrete. His most significant discovery was that only a high-strength steel at a high stress would achieve a permanent pre-stress in concrete. At first little recognized, Freyssinet’s methods were successfully applied at the Gare Maritime (harbour station) at Le Havre, Fr., in 1933 and gradually became universally adopted. After his invention in 1938 of a practical tool for applying tension to steel, the use of pre-stressed concrete became worldwide.