Buildings of Reinforced Concrete.
The Pugh Power Building, erected for manufacturing purposes in Cincinnati, is a capital example of what can be done with reinforced concrete. It is 68 feet wide, 335 long, and 159 high; its columns are spaced fourteen to seventeen feet longitudinally, twenty to twenty-three feet transversely; the floors are figured to bear a load of 230 pounds per square foot. In the same city is the Ingalls Building, for offices, 100 by 50 feet, and 210 feet high, designed by Mr. E. L. Ransome of New York. Among other structures of his design, executed in the same material, is the St. James Episcopal Church, Brooklyn, New York; buildings for the United Shoe Machinery Company, Beverly, Massachusetts, and piano factories for the Foster-Armstrong Company, Despatch, New York. The inspection shops of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, West 59th Street, New York, are also of reinforced concrete: no wood is used in wall or roof.
Reinforced concrete forms nine bins in one of the grain elevators of the Canadian Pacific Railway at Port Arthur, Ontario, on the shore of Lake Superior. The walls are nine inches thick, reinforced horizontally and vertically to a height of ninety feet and a diameter of thirty feet. There are also four intermediate bins, the whole thirteen holding 443,000 bushels. At South Chicago the Illinois Steel Company has built four similar bins for the storage of cement, each twenty-five feet in diameter and fifty feet high, with walls five to seven inches thick.
Many chimneys have been built of the new material; notably the chimney for the Pacific Coast Borax Company, Bayonne, New Jersey, 150 feet high, with an interior diameter of seven feet. These dimensions are exceeded at Los Angeles, California, where a chimney for the Pacific Electric Company rises 174 feet above its foundations, with an inside diameter of eleven feet. Both structures have hollow walls of the Ransome type reinforced horizontally and vertically.
That reinforced concrete serves to build chimneys and flues is proof of its fire-resisting quality. Concrete is a slow conductor of heat, and both it and steel have almost the same slight expansibility as temperatures rise, so that they remain together in a fire. Terra cotta, which expands much more than steel when heated, cracks off from the metal it was intended to protect, leaving it to bend or fuse in a blaze. Concrete, furthermore, behaves well when its temperature is suddenly lowered, as when a fireman dashes a stream of water upon it at a fire. No wonder, then, that the reinforced concrete is more and more in request in cities as the material for buildings rising higher and standing more thickly on the ground than did buildings of old. In the great fire in San Francisco, April, 1906, reinforced concrete withstood extreme temperatures much better than any other material. It will be largely used in rebuilding the city.
Column form, Ingalls Building, Cincinnati. A, A, yokes. B, B, spacing pieces. From “Reinforced Concrete.” A. W. Buel and C. S. Hill. Copyright, Engineering News Publishing Co., New York, 1904.