History
Using straw, sticks, and branches to reinforce adobe bricks and mud dwellings has happened since the earliest part of human history, and in the 16th and 17th centuries, French engineers used sticks to reinforce dikes. Reinforcing levees with branches has been done in China for at least a thousand years, and other reinforcements have been universally used to prevent soil erosion. Modern use of soil reinforcing for retaining wall construction was pioneered by French architect and engineer Henri Vidal in the 1960s. The first MSE wall in the United States was built in 1971 on State Route 39 near Los Angeles. It is estimated that since 1997, approximately 23,000 MSE walls have been constructed in the world. The highest MSE wall built in the United States is 30 m (98 ft) high.
Read more about this topic: Mechanically Stabilized Earth
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)