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Concept
Hardy Cross
Summary
Hardy Cross (1885–1959) was an American structural engineer and the developer of the moment distribution method for structural analysis of statically indeterminate structures. The method was in general use from c. 1935 until c. 1960 when it was gradually superseded by other methods.
Cross was born in Nansemond County, Virginia, to Virginia planter Thomas Hardy Cross and his wife Eleanor Elizabeth Wright. He had an elder brother, Tom Peete Cross, who would later become a Celtic studies scholar. Both studied at Norfolk Academy. Then he attended Hampden-Sydney College where he earned both B.A. and B.S. degrees. He obtained a BS in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1908, and then joined the bridge department of the Missouri Pacific Railroad in St. Louis, where he remained for a year, after which he returned to Norfolk Academy in 1909. After a year of graduate study at Harvard he was awarded the MCE degree in 1911. Hardy Cross developed the moment distribution method while working at University of Illinois.
Cross next became an assistant professor of civil engineering at Brown University, where he taught for seven years. After a brief return to general engineering practice, he accepted a position as professor of structural engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1921. At the University of Illinois Hardy Cross developed his moment distribution method. He left Illinois in 1937 to become the chair of the civil engineering department at Yale University, a position from which he retired in 1953.
Accurate structural analysis of statically indeterminate beams and frames could be performed by hand using the moment distribution method. In this method, the fixed-end moments in the framing members are gradually distributed to adjacent members in a number of steps such that the system eventually reaches its natural equilibrium configuration. However the method was still an approximation but it could be solved to be very close to the actual solution.
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