Reinforced Concrete facts

While investigating facts about Reinforced Concrete Design and Reinforced Concrete Pipe, I found out little known, but curios details like:

When railway tycoon George Pullman died in 1897, his family was so afraid that his corpse would be desecrated by employees, they buried him at night in a pit 8 feet deep, encased in floors and walls of steel-reinforced concrete in a lead-lined casket covered in layers of asphalt and steel rails.

how reinforced concrete works?

In 1880 a guy built a 200ft 14 storey tower made out of concrete with no steel reinforcement. It's still standing today, 140 years later, and is the tallest non-reinforced concrete structure in the world. It was designed as his mausoleum.

What is fiber reinforced concrete?

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what is fibre reinforced concrete. Here are 18 of the best facts about Reinforced Concrete Pipe Dimensions and Reinforced Concrete Slab I managed to collect.

what reinforced concrete pipe?

1. People were skeptical of reinforced concrete until the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, where the few concrete buildings survived the quake and fire remarkably. Now we produce about 7.5 billion cubic meters of concrete worldwide every year.

2. Marvin Heemeyer built a modified bulldozer in 2004, named Killdozer, to destroy his local town over zoning disputes. Killdozer consisted of armored plating, concrete reinforcements, video cameras, monitors and gun-ports for rifles and even included an AC for the inside.

3. In just the US, enough embalming fluid is buried every year to fill eight Olympic-size pools; more steel (in caskets alone) than was used to build the Golden Gate Bridge; and enough reinforced concrete to construct a two-lane highway from New York to Detroit.

4. In 1988, Sandia Laboratories crashed a fully loaded F4 Phantom jet travelling at around 770 kmh (480 mph) into a 4 m (13 ft) thick concrete slab to simulate a possible deliberate attack on a reinforced nuclear power plant. The impact vaporised the jet but left the slab relatively unscathed.

5. Charlie Chaplin's body was dug up in 1978 and held for ransom, and his coffin is now surrounded by reinforced concrete.

6. The materials used to build Christ the Redeemer were reinforced concrete and soapstone.

7. Concrete was originally used by the Romans as early as 150 BC. After the fall of the Roman Empire in 400 AD, the art of concrete was lost. Over 1000 years later, it was rediscovered in the mid-1800s and vastly improved by adding steel to it. This is our modern day reinforced concrete.

8. Reinforced concrete can get 'concrete cancer'. The rebar inside corrodes well before the concrete erodes, drastically shortening the life of the concrete structure.

9. The Pantheon's dome is the world's largest non-reinforced concrete dome.

10. In 1893 farmers made a 22,000 lb block of cheese for the Canadian Display at the Chicago World's Fair. It fell through the floor and was moved to the concrete reinforced floor of the Agricultural Building. It was awarded a bronze medal.

Why reinforced concrete columns?

You can easily fact check why is concrete reinforced with steel by examining the linked well-known sources.

Hong Kong's 374m tall Central Plaza houses the world's highest church inside a skyscraper, Sky City Church. It was the tallest building in Asia as well as the tallest reinforced concrete building in the world

Diaolou, fortified watchtowers made of reinforced concrete in Southern China mostly built in the 1920-30s. They are mostly abandoned and have both Chinese and Western architectural features. - source

The Pantheon in Rome was built in 126 AD and was the Largest dome in the world for more than 1,755 years until 1881 and is still the largest un-reinforced solid concrete dome in the world today. - source

The Seagram Building pioneered a method of construction using an interior reinforced concrete shell to support a larger non-structural edifice, and has the worst Energy Star rating of any building in New York, at 3 out of 100. - source

When was reinforced concrete invented?

If you reinforce concrete with glass fibers you can make it transparent