Handling flower pots for Joseph Monier (1823-1906), as a trained gardener, was nothing out of the ordinary. Yet the ardent inventor often found cause for annoyance in the poor quality of the plant containers, which, in his time – the middle of the 19th century, were mainly produced from clay or wood. Whilst clay is too heavy and breaks easily, pots made from wood mostly weather prematurely. So Joseph Monier began to experiment and seek a solution to the problem.

Monier first cast pots out of pure cement which were, however, not robust enough. Then he added wire insertions which caused their stability to increase appreciably. With his construction, produced after repeated attempts out of a wire basket and cement, the Frenchman could not possibly have dreamt that one day he would be considered as the inventor of reinforced concrete alongside François Coignet and Joseph-Louis Lambot who were engaged in parallel research. After further experimentation with wire and cement, Joseph Monier filed an application in 1867 for patenting his "procedure for manufacturing objects of various types from a combination of metal cage and cement". This should – as Monier writes – "occasion greater stability and economy in cement and labour". Other patents were to follow later concerning "supports and beams with iron insertions" and the eponymous inventor of "Monier iron" was finally also able to employ his discovery for a bridge construction made from iron concrete. In the park of the chateau of the Marquis de Tiliere near Chazelet in France, he constructed a first pedestrian bridge. In 1906, Monier died lonely and impoverished in a Parisian garret. Nonetheless, scientific research has continued in parallel throughout the world. The first cement standards were introduced into Germany shortly afterwards (1877) and several inventors – amongst them Thaddeus Hyatt, the US lawyer, and Gustav Adolf Wayss, an Austrian engineer – recognise the structural interactions within the "iron" concrete. In the following years, the factors influencing this concrete type's bonding action and durability continue to be investigated by various scientists independently from one another – constant progress is made in the quality of the composite material. Both in Europe and in the USA, numerous building structures reinforced with iron come into being at the end of the 19th century; the construction of larger bridges and the erection of high-rise buildings becomes possible for the first time. This can now be seen as the beginning of the "iron concrete" success story (in France also called "Monier concrete"), that is today known solely as "reinforced concrete". In the intervening time, reinforced concrete has become the most important composite material in the world and practically no building structure can get by without it. Typi- cally, flexurally stressed floorings or floor slabs are today manufactured for the most part from reinforced concrete. Massive construction components like bridge piers or retaining walls are also produced with it. And opus C shows what great things can be made with this wonderful construction material.