Joseph Monier

Joseph Monier (1823 to 1906) was a French gardener and one of the principal inventors of reinforced concrete. One of ten children in a family of horticulturists serving the duc d'Uzès, he was not sent to school but learned to read and write in evening classes in Paris. Dissatisfied with clay and wooden flowerpots, he made concrete pots and tubs and strengthened them with embedded iron mesh. He exhibited the invention at the Paris Exposition of 1867 and took his first patent that July for iron-reinforced horticultural troughs, followed by patents for pipes and basins in 1868, building facade panels in 1869, bridges in 1873 and beams in 1878. He designed the first iron-reinforced concrete bridge, built at the Chazelet castle in 1875. He was not the first to experiment with the material but promoted it extensively, and in 1885 the German engineer Gustav Adolf Wayss bought his patent and developed it further.