adaptable material we are barely com-
ing of age.”
in the summer of 1957.
Five reports on American bridges
appeared and they characterized well
the developments since 1951:
First was a discussion by Arthur L.
Elliott on construction experience
with prestressed concrete in California
where the state bridge department had
already contracted for over 60 pro-
The intervening years brought pre-
stressed concrete into the mainstream
of American construction practice; it
moved from the province of the pio-
neers such as Freyssinet and Magnel
into the practice of all structural engi-
neers not only in North America but
throughout the world.
jects.
38
In Europe, the Fédération Interna-
tionale de la Précontrainte (FIP) was
inaugurated at Cambridge University
in August 1952 (see box, p. 23).
In the United States, those six years
saw the organization of the Pre-
stressed Concrete Institute at Tampa,
Florida, in June of 1954, the publica-
tion of the first specification for pre-
tensioned prestressed concrete on Oc-
tober 7, 1954, by the PCI and in the
same year the “Criteria for Prestressed
Concrete Bridges” by the Bureau of
Public Roads; and the appearance of
American textbooks on prestressed
concrete structures, the most widely
used being that by T. Y. Lin, written
largely during his one-year Fulbright
Fellowship at Ghent with Professor
Gustave Magnel.
These events were the evidences of
the rapid growth of prestressed con-
crete throughout the United States and
the world; and it was this growth that
the Berkeley Conference summarized