EVER WONDER by Jacque Scott: Concrete

Concrete

Have you ever given any thought to the everyday thing we call concrete?  Let’s see what we can find out…

What do the Eddystone lighthouse on the coast of England, a Thai fishing boat, the ruined temple of Fortune in Palestrina, Italy, dating 20 years before the birth of Augustus, and many new railroad ties all have in common?  Hmmmm…They are all made of concrete.

Concrete is one of the oldest building materials known to man.  Emperor Augustus said that he changed Rome from a city of brick into a city of marble.  In fact he only added marble facades to existing solid concrete buildings faced with brick.  They survived centuries of earthquakes and invading warriors.

Before there was concrete, however, there had to be cement.  The recipe for concrete includes gravel or crushed stone or sand (in early times crumbled pottery and brick were used) and cement and water.  When combined with the rest, these two last items bind the mixture together and allow it to set as hard as natural stone.

Most early civilizations were in areas where there were deposits of natural cement— usually clay and limestone, but sometimes gypsum and volcanic ash.  Until recently no-one really understood how it all worked.

In 1824, about 9,000 years after man had learned to use cement, an Englishman named Joseph Aspdin, took out a patent on a synthetic cement consisting of a mixture of lime-stone and clay.  These were heated together to a high temperature and then ground to a very fine powder.  With his formula, he could make cement that was exactly the same every time.  Natural cement had never been of uniform quality.  Aspdin called his cement Portland Cement so that users would associate it with the concrete made from it with the gray building stone quarried from the British Isle of Portland.

Before the 1870’s, Americans were already making concrete with Portland cement. They imported cement by the barrelful from England.  Each barrel weighed 376 pounds.  Although we use sacks today instead of barrels, the quantity of cement is still figured by the old standard.  A sack is one-fourth of a barrel.

We have all seen the ready-mix concrete trucks on their way to pour house foundations, driveways, patios and even malls but what about concrete boats?  Many have used concrete over wire-mesh frames to make a boat that floats, is fireproof, leakproof, rotproof, creature proof, and is hard to damage.  One of the earliest concrete boats was built by a Frenchman in the 1800’s.  During the 1920’s, there were many boats made of concrete  traveling the seas and weighing 7500 tons.  They were as large as 54 by 434 feet.

So there you have it….  Concrete is essentially the same as it always has been for 1000’s of years — just a little more refined and uniform in quality.  God bless you.