Note Return to text — EXPERIMENTS ON RETAINING WALLS AND PRESSURES ON TUNNELS.

In a paper by the late Sir Benjamin Baker, Hon. M. Am. Soc. C. E., “The Actual Lateral Pressure of Earthwork,”[Footnote 8] two experiments by Lieut. Hope and one by Col. Michon, on counterforted walls, are given. Although such walls do not admit of precise computation, on account of the unknown weight of earth carried by the counterforts, through friction caused by the thrust of the earth in a direction perpendicular to the counterforts, still the computation was made, as the conclusions are interesting. Therefore, the first vertical wall of Lieut. Hope was examined, especially as Mr. Baker, using the Rankine theory, found, for this wall, the greatest divergence between the actual and the Rankine thrust, of any retaining wall examined.