ABSTRACT
Emil Oscar Winklervwas born in the year 1835 in Silesia and died in 1888. E. Winkler became a full Professor at the Technical University in Prague in the year 1865 where he began to teach water engineering, later on railway engineering, engineering mechanics and bridge engineering. The chapter presents the history of one of the wide used theoretical models of the substructure, the Winkler foundation. Since that time the elastic foundation has been applied to many engineering problems where the interaction of structures with foundation is necessary to be solved. That's the problem appearing in ground transportation systems like rails, sleepers and pavements. Timoshenko proved that the discrete supports of rails may be assumed as an elastic continuous foundation of Winkler type. The Winkler foundation was many times improved, e.g. taking into account two coefficients of foundation, considering non-linear effects, by introducing the stochastic distribution of foundation stiffness and by other improvements.
