Abstract
On July 9, at the invitation of the Council, a special lecture, illustrated by lantern views, was delivered at the Institution of Civil Engineers, by Prof. E. Coen Cagli, of the School of Engineering of Rome. Prof. Cagli reviewed very exhaustively the progress made during recent years at Italian harbours and gave particulars of the present accommodation and equipment at the leading ports. He related how, on his recommendation, following an official visit a number of years ago to Great Britain for the purpose of studying British methods and practice, the vertical wall type of breakwater came to be adopted in Italy, and he stated that, with the exception of an unfortunate experience at Catania, attributable to absence of vertical bond in the structure, the results had been uniformly successful. He described the catastrophic storm of March 26–27, 1933, which caused the displacement of 700 lineal metres of newly constructed breakwater at that port and compared it with the similar catastrophe which befell the second arm of the Mustapha Jetty at Algiers on Feb. 2–3 of the following year (vide NATURE, 135, 143, Jan. 26, 1935), giving it as his opinion that these two incidents, on an analysis of the attendant conditions, only served to confirm his judgment in favour of the vertical wall breakwater. This type, moreover, had received further support from a series of experimental tests with small scale models, which he had been conducting with the co-operation of Prof. Stuckey at the hydrological laboratory of the University of Lausanne. Prof. Coen Cagli closed his lecture with a statement of the series of conclusions at which he had arrived on the basis of his experimental investigations.
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Italian Breakwater Construction. Nature 136, 99 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136099a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136099a0