Edmond Coignet was a French engineer and entrepreneur

Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to...

. He has been instrumental in the theory of reinforced concrete

Reinforced concrete

Reinforced concrete is concrete in which reinforcement bars , reinforcement grids, plates or fibers have been incorporated to strengthen the concrete in tension. It was invented by French gardener Joseph Monier in 1849 and patented in 1867. The term Ferro Concrete refers only to concrete that is...

.

Life and Achievements

Coignet was the son of industrialist François Coignet

François Coignet

François Coignet was a French industrialist of the nineteenth century. He was a pioneer in the development of structural prefabricated and reinforced concrete. Coignet was the first to use iron-reinforced concrete as a technique for constructing building structures.- Biography :Coignet, along with...

 (1814-1888) and educated at the École centrale des arts et manufactures

École Centrale Paris

École Centrale Paris is a French university-level institution in the field of engineering. It is also known by its original name École centrale des arts et manufactures, or ECP. Founded in 1829, it is one of the oldest and most prestigious engineering schools in France and has the special status...

. He was the inventor of the agglomerate

Agglomerate

Agglomerates are coarse accumulations of large blocks of volcanic material that contain at least 75% bombs...

d concrete

Concrete

Concrete is a composite construction material, composed of cement and other cementitious materials such as fly ash and slag cement, aggregate , water and chemical admixtures.The word concrete comes from the Latin word...

 to strengthen the cement

Cement

In the most general sense of the word, a cement is a binder, a substance that sets and hardens independently, and can bind other materials together. The word "cement" traces to the Romans, who used the term opus caementicium to describe masonry resembling modern concrete that was made from crushed...

 with metal inserts. He permanently reoriented the family business to construction. In 1892 he applied his innovative construction methods on the aqueduct of Achères in Paris. Coignet was the first to use reinforced concrete piles and built with the architect Jacques Hermant

Jacques Hermant

Jacques-Rene Hermant was a French architect, one of the most renowned architects of fin-de-siècle Paris....

some of the first Parisian buildings in this material.