Karl Culmann
(1821-1881)

Karl Culmann was a famous German bridge and railway engineer. In 1849-1850 he spent two years traveling in England and the United States to study bridges, which he later wrote about in Germany. He designed numerous bridge structures at the newly organized Zürich Polytechnicum. Culmann made many developments in graphical methods and wrote the first book on graphic statics, published in 1866. Stress trajectories are one of the original topics presented in this book.

From Mechanics of Materials, 4th Ed., by J.M. Gere and S.P. Timoshenko, PWS Publishing, 1997, pp. 835-42.