At Bomanite, we are experts in concrete and concrete has a very interesting (and long) history. Have you ever wondered how some of the largest, most majestic structures on Earth were created? Have you ever stumbled upon an artifact in a museum or taken a tour of the Colosseum and thought, “how did they manage to build something like this, and how is it still standing?”
Dating the first use of concrete depends on how you define what concrete is and what it’s made of. There is quite a bit of evidence of experimentation with clay, limestone, and chalk by ancient civilizations that help us navigate modern-day concrete’s evolution.
Around 1300 BC, Middle Eastern builders learned that applying burnt limestone to the clay walls of their homes created a durable surface, a predecessor to cement, one of the primary ingredients in modern concrete.
The Bedouins who lived in modern Syria and Northern Jordan around 6500 BC also used concrete-like substances. Eventually, they discovered ways to use hydraulic lime, and by 700 BC, concrete floors became a common feature of their architecture.
By 600 BC, the Greeks were using a pozzolan, a broad group of siliceous and aluminous substances that, when mixed with water, developed into a cement-like material. They mixed it with lime (from limestone) to use in construction. But it paled in comparison to the architecture that would be built by the Romans.
Their version of concrete is different than today’s almost liquid, flowing substance that’s poured into forms. Some of the more impressive Roman structures were built using volcanic sand. They discovered that mixing this sand with lime and water caused a reaction, forming a very solid rock-like material that they used to build the Roman Baths, the Pantheon, and the Colosseum.
With the fall of the Roman Empire, documents demonstrating the Roman’s cement techniques would be lost until 1414, when newly unearthed manuscripts showed exactly how they achieved their long-lasting structures. Without this discovery, historians argue that adaptations of today’s concrete would have looked very different.
Fast forward to 1793 England, where an engineer named John Smeaton devised another method to create cement, formulating a powder using clay containing lime. Smeaton and other English engineers are credited with innovative use of chalk, clay, and heat to improve cement technology into the 1800s.
By 1860, tests were being conducted to determine the strength of cement, and to study its chemical components. By 1890, rotary kilns became the main tool for mixing and temperature control.
During the 19th century, concrete was mostly used for industrial buildings since it was considered unfashionable for homes. The first concrete streets were poured in the United States in 1891 and most of them still exist today.
Modernity’s most impressive and useful structures would not have been possible without concrete. For example, the Hoover Dam was built using over 3.2 million yards of concrete and provides water control for farming, domestic use, and hydroelectric power. The substances the Bedouins, Greeks, and Romans experimented with laid a foundation (see what we did there?) for 18th and 19th century engineers to develop tools we still use today.
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