“I decided to risk all that I had of
fortune, reputation and strength in
making the idea of prestressing an in-
dustrial reality. Foreseeing a long and
hard struggle and a need for financial
assistance, I took the precaution of
taking out patents.”
Freyssinet was at the time the co-
manager of the large construction firm
of Entreprises Limousin. His partner,
M. Limousin, considering Freyssinet’s
ideas unsound, refused to go along
with him. As Freyssient later de-
scribed the controversy:
“Convinced that my attempts would
soon ruin me, he considered that his
friendship made it a duty for him to
oppose at all cost what he considered
to be folly. For me, on the contrary,
this folly, even if it was to prove dis-
astrous, was a mission that I had to
fulfill whatever sacrifices might be re-
quired.
“At the beginning, these sacrifices
were indeed considerable. I lost the
best of friends, a very good financial
situation, the joys given me by my
profession as an engineer and the
many collaborators that I had trained
and loved and worse, who considered
me as a deserter.
“At the age of 50, I was abandoning
a life that was already mapped out in
order to throw myself into one that
was full of uncertainties and perils.”
To get some idea of the type of per-
son who would give up security to
seek a new way of building, I shall
give a brief sketch of Freyssinet’s
pre-1933 background, along with
some assessment of his contributions
and a discussion of how prestressing
came to America after World War II
and flowered in the 1950s
For this last discussion, I shall focus
on the first two major American pre-
stressing conferences, one at the Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology at
Cambridge in 1951 and the other at
the University of California at Berke-
ley in 1957. Much as I would like to
explore in detail the wide develop-
ments after 1957, I find these last 45
years too broad for me to make coher-
ent in a single paper. Instead, I shall
end this discourse with several con-
temporary examples whose purpose is
to show something of the continuing
nature of the European influence on
American construction.