Set: The History of Concrete
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- čas přidán 7. 09. 2024
- The fascinating history of the compound that can fairly be said to be the very foundation upon which civilization stands.
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In 1984, the Sun and Fun RV park was being built on Ave 200 just outside Tulare CA. Me and my friends rode our bicycles the 5 miles to check it out. While riding my bike on the sidewalk, I rode over a patch that wasn't yet dry and left tire marks. They are still there today. The only reason I know is I live there today and walk by it daily.
growing old is smiling at small vandalisms into local concrete works, knowing that those kids might just spend a lifetime smiling at that memory.
a small price to pay for so many smiles.
Alert the media! /s
I had a Sun and Fun back in 1995!
I used to love seeing old handprints of kids from the old WPA sidewalk projects in my neighborhood. These are getting close to 90 years old now & I often wondered if any of the owners of those handprints still lived in the area & if they’d ever visited their prints when they were older.
@@goldenageofdinosaurs7192, "I walk in the footprints of children", says this ancient dinosaur/humanoid. Or handprints, as the case may be....
My dad was a civil engineer, and owned a concrete testing company. He worked on a lot of michigan road projects and was a perfectionist. The companies dont get paid by the state until he signs off. His famous saying, driving over the Lansing portion of I 69 (he did NOT work on it), which had bumps every 10ft and sounded like you were on railroad tracks, was "I would never have signed off on this!". 😂 we still say "dad would not have signed off on this". Every project he worked on was well done, even if they had to rip it out 3x, which did not make him popular. But his projects live on, in excellent condition, and will never be on shows like 'engineering disasters'. 😊
M6 in Grand Rapids MI was featured on a engineering disasters show, as soon after it was built it developed huge holes and other problems. The issue was too much air in the concrete, as a result of the trucks bringing it in drive over such bumpy roads while mixing.😂 oopsey!
You don’t get to control the users - engineering disasters can be mobile.
I live in Michigan and wished your Dad worked “everywhere”.
Your dad was the kind of perfectionist we desperately need today. Sad that engineers like that are disappearing.
That is a proud legacy!
The thumbnail of the big paw print got me. In 2016 we decided to have built a enclosed heated swimming pool. The owner of the pool company asked me to come out to see the concrete patio they had just finished smoothing out for our deck/TV area at the far end of the pool. When we both noticed my very big Walker hound on the far side of the wet cement who decided to take a walk across the wet cement. The pool guy was horrified, but I laughed. I told him to leave the big paw prints as it would always remind me of my big lovable boy. I lost my hound boy 07-19-23. I laugh everyday when I go out to the pool and see those beautiful paw prints. Shalom
Woofs 🐾
I would love to have my beloved pooch immortalized in my pool patio.
@@Tmrfe0962 When "Valentine" did that I thought this was his gift to me for when he was gone.
New concrete is damn caustic, my brother in law got concrete poisoning
If they're in an area that gets whether you might put a sealer on them. One of the Problems with that happening.Is it disrupts the finish. Company I worked for did Foundations for an indian reservation. A bobcat walked across one slab at night. When the superintendent complained , I told him I should charge him for stamping.
Concrete, WA has been around since 1909. Concrete WA history began in 1890, when the town-site was platted by Magnus Miller. A post office was set up, and the name “Baker” was adopted. This was on the west bank of the Baker River. On the east bank of the river, the community that sprang up around the Washington Portland Cement Company (1905) was named “Cement City.” After the Superior Portland Cement Company plant (1908) was built in Baker, it was decided to merge the two towns, and in 1909, after much discussion, the new community settled on the name “Concrete.”
I grew up in Concrete, WA! Thank you for posting.
That's is a Solid comment.
@@327JohnnySS hahaha! Possibly even foundational.
Yeah! My family lived in Concrete a while ago. My great grandad lived there before moving to Eastern WA in the depression to be a crane operator at the grand coulee dam, then to Bremerton to work in the shipyard around WWII. Been in Washington for a while.
As a “concrete construction field engineer” for forty years, concrete has always fascinated me. Excellent topic for the THG world wide staff to showcase so well. Thanks Team THG.
I come from a family with a lot of engineers. My dad was a civil one and owned a concrete testing company. Later he worked on Michigan road projects. 😊
@@bradleyalexander5821 I did that very same thing for 5 years or so. It was tough but I learned so much and do not regret that experience at all.
Forty years as a field and lab tech here. I sometimes find myself walking the QA guys from the suppliers through some of the test procedures.
In 1983/4 the US Air Force built a "special" concrete silo for testing the resistance of new type of concrete that was made using an additive slurry. They tested it by trying to blow it up with a Lot of
explosives. The Department of Energy Office of Science and Technology did issue a report in it in 1988. The concrete mixture was labeled SIFCON. The test was called the: Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Silo Superhardening Technology. Interesting reading.
@@raywhitehead730
Thank you for that interesting fact. Again concrete always fascinates me.
I’m always impressed with THG when he covers a topic that I know about, and it serves to further impress me with how good he is at researching to a high level on a subject and presenting the most salient points (not just random interesting points), and how quickly THG must do this in order to turn around so many videos.
I tip my hat to you sir
This hard-hitting video is the most solid one you've published in a long time, Lance! I'm sure that making it had you pre-stressed, but you pre-cast a wide net with it, and you reinforced what you said. As I pore over this video, in the aggregate I'm quite impressed! This video is truly one for the ages!
One more bad pun and I'll slab you silly! 😉
Truly, a ready mix of puns, the foundation of humor. Bravo on a clever construction moulded to stand the test of time. I could not have poured a better conglomerate of quick-setting humor.
@@TheHistoryGuyChannel It did have a rocky beginning though.
I was trying to expose the cement company for using cheap materials.
But I couldn't find any concrete evidence.
You've got a talent Robert. I've been keeping track. You should publish where you are appearing next.
Ha! 😂
LOL! Very punny sonny.
It's amazing how difficult it can be to find things that are set in stone.....😉
"Try the veal." :o)
When I was younger, I worked in construction for about 12 years
Nothing more satisfying, then turning around and looking back at sidewalk you just poured.
Another great episode!
Here in Bellefontaine, Ohio we are reminded that Court Ave. Is the first Concrete Street in America every time we drive or walk down main street. There's a sign right there. Another one as you come into town. There's a nice little coffee shop there, and the first Edward Jones office.
One of my first jobs was working for a concrete company. I small one. The owner was very knowledgeable and enthusiastic. We did mostly small jobs like curbing, and the biggest jobs were driveways. I LOVED that job. I learned so much. I learned the "ART" of concrete finishing, and I could put a mirror finish on it. Of course that is not what is always wanted, but it could be done. I would love to build a concrete house for myself one day.
@bruscifer Come to Florida where we have the next best thing, CBS (concrete block) construction, the safest kind of house in which to weather hurricanes.
@@wayneyadams Sounds cool to me!
Your factoid about concrete being the second most consumed product by man vs water is a WOW factor for me.
Personally I have never "consumed" concrete, but I would surmise that it takes a lot of water to wash it down with!
@@goodun2974 LOL
@v.e.7236 If you read my post, you'll see that I worked at a cement manufacturing plant west of Miami that produced a little over a million tons a year. A few miles north of us was a competitor with a smaller plant, and north of them was, at the time, the world's largest cement manufacturing plant. I don't know what the output was, but I'm guessing close to twice our capabilities. Between our three plants, I'm estimating we produced three to three and a half million tons a year, and that is just in the Miami area back in 1980. Almost all of that went to ready mix plants. The most common mix is called 1:2:3, so cement makes up about one-sixth of the concret, so if you multiply our combined cement output by six, you get about twenty million tons of concrete a year in South Florida alone. Of course, we were experiencing a building boom as high rise offices and residences were being built all long the coast.
When I was about 20 we had a lecture by a historian from the Building Research Institute. He explained that a vast field of triangular concrete hut foundations in Mesopotamia (Probably Iraq) had been discovered that were almost 5000 years old. Nobody knows who made them. Unfortunately the secrete of making concrete keeps getting lost and rediscovered, with new tricks added on each occasion. The Concrete in the salt water Harbour of Ostia built by the Romans is still solid today. Then go and look at the Pantheon in Rome. A miracle of design, still solid and in ue today. The Romans were amazing.
The book I'm currently reading is "Claudius the God" by Robert Graves. After he became Emperor, Claudius undertook a project to fix the harbor at Ostia to ensude that ships could enter the port even in bad weather.
Unfortunately there was often a temptation to use substandard concrete and other building materials, especially in poorer countries: Back in the 80s I was taking a ferryboat out of Athens to the island of Mitilini/Lesbos; looking at my guidebook when we left the Athens Harbor, it specifically mentioned a set of unfinished and abandoned concrete buildings, visible from the ship, that were uninhabitable because the concrete had been poured using salt water for the mix due to the shortage and cost of fresh water. "A monument to graft and corruption", read the text.
Concrete in itself is pretty simple, hence "natural concrete". As an alternative to hauling multi-ton stones around it's influence can't be underestimated. Just think pyramids made of concrete, and less slave labor.
@@goodun2974 There have been growing concerns about the use of beach/sea sand instead of quarried sand, and that there are buildings that are under threat of collapse due to this substitution. It didn't sound like it was the water specifically that was the problem so much as the salty and smooth nature of the sand.
@@TWX1138 , They can rinse the salt from the sand, but since the sand tends to be polished against itself by the wave action that pushed it up on the beach, it may be only slightly more granular, and jagged or irregular, than the sand in the Sahara which has been eroded by the action of wind.
Having been a concreter for over 40 years and a hard construction supervisor for nearly 10, I found this fascinating. I couldn't believe how "wet" the concrete was in the "early" videos..., that would be rejected in a heartbeat now-a-days.
No Super P in that mix for sure.
Yup! Too much "slump" meant a weak mix and prone to fail.
I saw in a video that the concrete used in making the Hoover dam is still curing till this day. That blows my mind.
Duct tape, saccharine sweetener, shipping crates and now concrete... I sometimes think that The History Guy makes some of these videos just to see if there's a topic too mundane for us to enjoy.
Keep looking, Lance! 😉
My first summer job was loading the materials into cement trucks to create ready-mix concrete. One of my worst days was when I accidentally loaded 2X the cement required and they had to dump the entire load and wash out the truck. The drivers never let me forget that day.
Awesome!
My family owned a large concrete forming company in Denver from the 1950's until 2010, when we had to unfortunately close the doors after the recession. It was unrecoverable at that point, due to jobs being stopped and too much overhead right before it.
However, I learned a lot during that time!
I was an architectural engineer. Working with steel is relatively straight forward. But I enjoyed designing reinforced concrete for the challenge. It always seemed like magic that a contractor could pour fancy "mud" and it could harden into huge safe structures.
Thanks for the history lesson.
Great episode! As someone who has to lay laminate, tile and carpet over finished concrete, I knew a bit about this, but some of it I certainly didn't!
Thanks, and have a great week!
Good monday morning THG and fellow history fans.
1:55 *"I remember the Tower of Babel, all 37 feet of it, which I suppose was impressive at the time. And when it fell, they howled, 'Divine wrath!' But come on, dried dung can only be stacked so high."*
_Castiel_
Thanks for another great video. My dad pored concrete back in the 1950's & 60's, mixed with railroad clinkers from the coal fired train that ran through our small town, most of the concrete is still there today. In the 1970's some of his concrete had to be removed to put in a city water line, since the city said we couldn't use our well & outhouse anymore, the concrete broke a couple of teeth off of a back hoe that tried to bust it, they finally busted through it with a Jack Hammer. I wish I had his recipe, but it died with him back in 1983, RIP Dad.
We have your dads recipy in Denmark. If you are seriously interested.
Thank you Lance for this brief spotlight on concrete. Concrete helps engineers solve many problems and is one of their favorite tools. It is important to note that not all concrete is created equal. The quality can vary greatly and it is necessary to monitor the quality of products used to make it, the suitability of the mix design, the method used to apply and cure it, and final strength testing of the cured product. It is a science in and of itself. I often wonder how the ancients knew so much about it and how that expertise became lost during the Dark Ages.
Hmmm , i dunno mate , we look around in todays world with computers doing more and more for us every day in so many fields , you could be excused for thinking we are slowly being dumbed down .
in the old days they probably had skilled people that where specialists in some areas , but life was somewhat unpredictable and often short , off with his head ..... or throw him to the lions :), or a volcano erupted ....boom whole villages of people gone .
actually when you look around at politics and the people that vote a certain way today , sometimes you think of that movie Idiocrasy and wonder if that ship has already floated in our time :) .
@@mikldude9376 We are being too dependent on technology doing so much for us. Ask someone what their own phone number is and they might have to pull their phone out to find out. But the fall of the Roman Empire had a lot to do with the decline of civilization and science. Many records were destroyed and many people with skills got murdered. It was a time when humanity devolved instead of evolved. I hope history doesn't repeat itself in that respect.
wet curing for 10 days is my go to method
@@davidmorse8432 It already has repeated itself: for example, in the early days of the Soviet Union, throughout the German National Socialists reign in Europe, during the Red Guard horror in China, and when ISIS took it upon itself to rewrite history by destroying artefacts in Mosul.
@@lizj5740 Good point! 👍
As a veteran of 40 years in the building and construction industry I was transfixed by your video, so wonderful! Thank you HISTORY GUY for the detail in your video, huge swaths of information that I as never aware of, and I have used a LOT of concrete!! How wonderful, I have been a Chartered Building Professional holding a Bachelors Degree in building science.
As a concrete truck driver, tester and Plant Manager, this episode is interesting. Roman concrete lasts longer because they included Volcanic Ash in the ingredients.
The sand used in concrete is worth a memtion, at least for modern concrete. Not all sand is good for use in concrete, the best sand is dredged out of rivers. The desert sands, like from the enormous reserves of the Sahara, don’t work well. Has to do with the grain surface roughness/sharpness, versus the smoothness of wind eroded material. So rivers are being dredged and altered, damaging them for this purpose.
Cheers, Sir. Love your history lessons!
Sand is critical for concrete; and as we are forced to relocate and rebuild, to raise our homes and harden our infrastructure due to the effects of climate change, the world may find itself fighting over sand supplies.
sounds like someone needs to invent a simple low-cost process to turn desert sands into rougher sand grains. Some sort of accelerated water erosion tank process perhaps?
@@SoloRenegade Yeah, afaik, the difference is in the roughness. Wind rounds the grains against each other, with smaller ones - down to mineral dust - acting as the “abrasive”. Big river-sand deposits form relatively soon after lots of crushing by bigger rocks in a deluge.
Might be easier to just crush whole rock down to small. Interesting problem.
@@goodun2974 Seemingly strange as a motivator in geopolitics, but I agree. Think tanks probably have this situation gamed already.
@@johnnyliminal8032 not all desert sand is dust. you sift for the starting size or larger, that you want/need for the process.
Good Monday morning History Guy and everyone watching...
I remember as a child coming across an issue of Popular Mechanics that discussed the possibility of building concrete submarines. They would higher crush depth than steel-hulled submarines and would be nearly invisible to sonar when stationary. They would be slow, so the idea would be to have them sit on the ocean floor in strategic locations. Still stands out in my mind decades later.
Thanks History Guy. This is one of the best channels on CZcams. Don't ever change.
Discussion of ancient concrete so often begins and ends with the Romans, it was awesome to learn about the uses and achievements of other civilizations.
This was one of your best IMO
I lived the first 9 years of my life in a village that was owned by one of the largest cement producers in the US. It was just south of Hannibal, MO and was named from the elements in Cement, ILASCO. Many years later I worked for a civil engineering firm that tested the strength of concrete. I was interested in how you would report it. Currently, there are construction companies who use fly ash from coal fired plants. The fly ash is mixed with clay and compacted. The result is very strong road beds and foundations.
What years were those? Back in 1980, I worked at General Portland Cement the second largest cement producer in the US at the time.
Michigan State University has concrete canoe races each year, on the Red Cedar River which flows thru campus.😊
It must be difficult to unearth history that is set in stone, but THG refused to crack under pressure. He did a great job aggregating the material and binding it all together!
I poured over 200 hundred separate bags of quick Crete for my garage floor by hand, came out great, still can’t believe it. Thanks
That was not fun! Especially if mixed by hand in a wheel barrel!
@@mikewithers299 Ours still holding up, but lots of work getting it looking right.
I think that's called masochism. LOL
I appreciate your research. These days people think they can choose whatever they want to be truth and ignore reality.
More enlightened minds realise the folly of such and savour the accuracy of your truthful work
A contractor friend of mine once described concrete this way:
There are 2 kinds of concrete: cracked, and gonna crack!
Apparently his assumptions were incorrect!
Always wondered what the connection was to Portland, Maine. Now I know, thanks History Guy!
@peashooterc9475 LOL, you were only a few thousand miles west on the wrong continent.
@@wayneyadams Hey, I was a kid in NH. Who knew there was more than one!😀
The Romans built structures and roads that have lasted 2000 years or more. My city can't even build concrete roads that go 20 years without need of substantial repair.
Roman roads were not pounded by a constant stream of fast-moving heavy vehicles. I doubt a Roman road would last a week of traffic from 40 ton tractor semi-trailers. Hell, one truck might noticeably damage a Roman road.
And that preserves a lot of Jobs in the public sector😂
Donkeys and wooden carts didn't weigh nearly as much and I feel wasn't nearly as often used by their "semis"
You only see the few remaining roman structures. The vast vast majority collapsed. I'm sure your city has buildings which if left alone would survive for millennia.
Survivorship bias. Learn about it.
You have the "12 o'Clock High" beer stein up on the shelf. I have never seen that outside of the movie before. What a wonderful mug of conversation to have!
Google it - there is a company that makes them in various sizes and styles (mug, milk pitcher, etc.). Not cheap, but very well done.😎
We had a mutt (chow chow, akita, shepard, ???) named "Mix." He walked across the foundation concrete and got it all over his fur. We did our best to wash him off before the lye burned him, but we referenced to him as "Concrete Mix" for a while.
If self-healing concrete teams up with Skynet, we're in trouble.
btw - the Romans found that if they mixed bulrushes with concrete, the result was much stronger. They called it 'Reeding between the Limes"
lol
Your joke didn't pass the pre-stress test....
If you make any more jokes that bad I'm gonna hav'ta call for reinforcements....
Yeah, anymore bad jokes like that and you're going to need to be "re-barred" from making anymore. LOL Just joking!!
3:05 I read the Robert Graves novels _I, Claudius_ and _Claudius, the God_ before the outstanding BBC miniseries came out (ever wonder how Patrick Stewart would look with hair?).
You may remember Claudius as a driving force in a system of aqueducts, but one of his projects involved scuttling a ship full of dry concrete mix, allowing the sea water to hydrate the mix.
The engineers protested, "But Caesar, the cement will not set in salt water."
"You will find a way to make cement that will set in sea water. Or else..." Something distracted Claudius before he could finish his thought with "...we will have to find another way."
The engineers took the unfinished sentence as a hanging threat, and within a week they had solved the cement problem, at least the way Graves wrote it.
This was oddly satisfying- in the best possible way!
If I remember correctly, Roman concrete was not reinforced like modern concrete is, and a large part of the reason for modern concrete breaking down as quickly as it does has to do with water seeping into the concrete and causing it to start rusting. Rust, in turn, causes the reinforcing bars to take up more space, causing the concrete to fracture. And as the concrete cracks, it allows more water in, increasing the speed the reinforcing material rusts at, leading to even more pressure inside concrete, and a vicious cycle of decay.
Is there a concrete out there that doesn't have potholes after the first winter? Please contact any Canadian municipality with the answer. Merci.
There are other causes, but last winter it was mainly snow plows scraping the road off the road, and breaking curbs everywhere. They went berserk in Wisconsin.
I always find it interesting that ancient technology is either still in use today, or what was made so long ago (Roman concrete) has actually out lasted the modern equivalent. This reminds me of an old saying; "If it's not broken (still works) don't fix (change or replace) it. Speaking of ancient tech, we still use one of the original technologies today, to cook our food and heat our homes, controlled fire (pre stone age?)
Another interesting history lesson, thanks. ;-)
It also reinforces something I have always said, we are not smarter than our ancestors, just technologically more advanced. We're still not sure how the pyramids were built.
A HISTORY GUY video that will be forever 'set in stone'. 😉
I very much enjoyed this video. In a video about ancient America, the narrator said he asked an old Mexican native what "secret ingredient" his ancestors used to make cement that lasted so long. He was told they used "eggs." That seemed laughable, of course, until you said the Mayans may have incorporated "organic compounds" into concrete's molecular structure (see: @5:01).
Years ago a guy taught me a lot about concrete. "There's 2 types of concrete, concrete thats cracked and concrete that isn't"
*yet
I know a similar tidbit of wisdom. There are two types of concrete: that which is cracked and that that will crack.
All of your videos are fantastic.
Thank you for the concise and educational summary of the "History of Concrete" I love the pictures and illustrations you show during the podcast
A lot of hard work and research has gone into this . Thank you for posting !
You did not mention tabby, an early form of concrete that was used in the coastal Southeastern U.S. in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Tabby was formed by burning oyster shells to create lime and then mixing it with water, sand, and seashells. Tabby was used by the Spanish colonists in Florida and the English colonists in Georgia and the Carolinas in the 18th Century and its use continued into the 19th Century.
Closely related to Tabby is coquina which can be found in Florida. The Spanish used it to build Castillo de San Marco in Saint Augustine. It has the advantage of being almost impervious to cannon fire.
This humble product has elevated the human quality of live exponentially. Our literal and proverbial foundation.
This is amazing! I'm sending on to a friend who is an engineer friend. Thanks!
My Danish great-grandfather worked for Portland Cement in Aalborg as a stoker. He died there in 1924 when he fell into a pit of some sort (IIRC). One of my Dad's aunts in Aalborg had a small clear-glass, rectangular ashtray from Portland Cement with a red border and a horse pictured. Just a tidbit from Liz and Ginger (pic left) in Australia.
Some people's minds are like concrete: throughly mixed and permanently set.
One significant reason we find Roman works still standing after thousands of years is that they are located in an ideal climate for preserving concrete. Comparing that against, say, an overpass in Chicago, is not fair and the weather dwarfs any effect of the difference in materials.
And they're not spreading hundreds of tons of road salt in Rome either
An episode full of solid facts that really cemented our understanding of this sturdy building material.
I love the engineering focus on some of the videos. Just returned from a trip to the Pacific Northwest and learned about steam donkeys and other devices that enabled loggers to fell the giant trees of the region. Dangerous work, lots of injuries were involved too, so some interest may be generated. Keep up the good work!
This was a very hard subject. Thank you for covering it.
This was interesting. Amazing what our ancient ancestors were able to do with a few simple ingredients.
The pantheon is reinforced with porcelain rope. Basalt rebar is the modern equivalent.
Most of our concrete fails because of spalling from steel rebar, and the companies selling it make more money because it needs replacement.
As I understand it, the opening premise is something of a misnomer. It’s not that we can’t produce concrete that is stronger (we regularly do for facilities that require hardening like ICBM silos) it’s that we 1) didn’t know how it was done in antiquity, and 2) we didn’t do it today because our methods are cheaper and easier… which means more profitable.
Very good video. I'm a retired civil engineer. Much of today's concrete problems are from cutting corners during construction. Good Luck, Rick
I was literally talking about this yesterday with some coworkers!
You’re in my head THG!
Concrete people are all mixed up and set in their ways. From a concrete workers perspective, concrete is a chemical reaction that causes anxiety. From a "Readymix concrete", truck driver over the last forty years now retired.
You sound as if you're pre-stressed....🤔😉
Nothing raises your blood pressure and heart rate like a cement truck rolling on site. I can vouch for that! 🤣
@@mikewithers299 , time and concrete wait for no man!
@goodun2974 you know it brother! 🤣
@@goodun2974 Too much sugar to be stressed. Retirement is that sweet.
In 1955 the Portland Cement Association published a series of plans for building suburban homes made of concrete. My father built one of them. An interesting aspect of the construction was the treatment of the concrete on the outside surfaces. I’m uncertain of the mix. But, it contained Portland cement and mica which gave the ranch house a brilliant white exterior. The slurry was applied thinly with brushes.
Making house walls from concrete with styrofoam forms is a thing that happens today but It's not done that much around here.
Linus Pualing, a Two time winner of the Nobel Prize, did work on the chemical bonds of concrete in his early days. There is a scientific journal that specifically addresses , concrete. It's so ubiquitous in current life, that few are quizzical about it.
Watching your video brings up sadness for me. Growing up, I spent a lot of time at the Birmingham Central Library, constructed in 1974 in Concrete in the Brutalist style.
It was a safe haven for me, filled with good spaces to read a book. I have many fond memories there.
The building was demolished in 2016, and I still feel very sad about it. Now, the only place it exists is in my memories.
If I were good at building in Minecraft, I’d recreate it, but that’s impossible for me.
I don’t understand people who think it’s okay to just knock down a building without considering its history.
At least there are some museums in the UK that have preserved buildings by taking them down brick by brick and rebuilding them in open-air museums.
Surprised brutalism wasn't invented to further the concrete industry.
This is my third favorite Roman topic after toilets and mosaics. Fascinating stuff, thank you.
Maybe some could develop a "mobile kiln" that could use the heat from an active volcano to cook up the lime.
The dirt work under the concrete, vapor berries and drainage are super important to having a strong successful long lasting structure. All the Roman stuff that is still standing is on good soil. Fiberglass reinforcement is cool. A good contractor is worth it. There are a lot of folks, not from around here, that will pour out mud, finish it get paid and are gone. If you have a problem, good luck getting them back to fix anything.
The premise that history is linear is hobbling our understanding of humanity. athere are clearly many ancient buildings that we cannot replicate today.
Living in Florida I have plenty of lime so I've been making my own lime concrete for years. I even make landscaping blocks with it.
Lime? We have plenty of limestone which can me turned into lime.
For a long time it's been my understanding that modern concrete does not last like Roman concrete because of the rebar. The rebar rusts, expands, and the concrete flakes apart. Modern concrete can span gaps that were formerly impossible, but at the price of eventual self-destruction.
Gobekli Tepe has a form of concrete floors. In fact, there are even older sites in Turkey that have concrete floors, but there's no way I can spell there names.
Aircrete and Hempcrete and the dry pour method are at the forefront of the evolution of concrete.
I have no experience with Aircrete or Hempcrete but I do with Dry Pour. It sounds good in theory but it requires much more diligence during application. That being said I have had to remove dry poured concrete many times because of poor mixing leaving dry powder pockets causing weak points and failures.
My grandfather was a solid plasterer, and my father a visual artist and printmaker. How roman concrete was made with volcanic ash, was something I have known since childhood. Im 58. So I don't get how this is something new.
My family immigrated from South Africa in the 1930s because my great-uncle had patented a unique concrete curing method that they wanted to use in the building of the Hover Dam. We have 8mm video of the family on the decks of the Queen Mary on their way to this great country...
Thank God for ready mixed concrete. When I was younger, I worked for a steel building construction company. I shudder to think what it would have been like if we'd had to mix the concrete for the pads on site!
I liked how you were able to aggregate all this information into one solid block. 😎
I learned about concrete today, thank you.
Thank you!
the new Fiberglass Rebar will help with longevity also, no more rust jacking.
It might have been instructive to mention that large concrete structures like the Hoover Dam take decades for the concrete to cure. Concrete also doesn't set very well in low temperatures but it does generate internal heat as it cures and so insulated blankets are often put over recently poured foundations in order to trap that heat and help accelerate the curing process. There are additives that can be put into the concrete to make it cure more quickly, especially in cool weather, but the finished concrete isn't as strong. The other thing missing from this video was any mention of lift-slab building techniques, which are crucial for modern building construction; unfortunately it's a tricky process and if something goes wrong there is invariably loss of life.
As a mason, we'll doing masonry. I absolutely loved listening to this episode.
Precast concrete has another advantage in that it allows significant pieces of a structure to be created offsite and then simply lifted into place. That means less surrounding ground needs to be used for such processes. So the pieces can simply be created elsewhere, trucked to the site, and then immediately lifted into place, speeding construction and allowing the project to be completed with a minimal footprint.
It should be noted that certain of Germany's bunkers (notably the intended V2 production and launch sites) incorporated organic material into the concrete in order to allow it to basically grow its own camouflage and it was observed that this is serving to retard the decay of these structures.
Very interesting. You "stirred" my "mix" of latent Civil Engineering genes, inherited from my father. He was an "impervious" fellow who was somewhat "self-repairing" for 85 years. 😂 Thanks!
Thank you!
I've read those papers on Roman cement, and the solution to creating the chemically active chunks of lime that make it self-healing is called "hot-mixing," meaning that the quicklime is not slaked before being mixed with the other dry ingredients and those chunks form when the water is added for final mixing. Modern cement has been mixed from slaked lime out of safety concerns (related to the heat production) and quality concerns over the idea that chunks forming would weaken the material. Obviously, this may have been a bad move in hindsight, as the researchers didn't notice enough adverse effects to make it not worthwhile to have a self-healing material.
I liked your show. I would have liked it more if you included some of the concrete history of concrete in Toronto, Canada. Beside the early use of reinforced concrete along the port for mills back at the turn of the last century, we built Scotia Tower. The tower is the second tallest building in Canada and is completely a reinforced concrete building from top to bottom. If my memory is correct, all the beams and columns were all cast at 60 MPA; you could hit this building with a space shuttle and it will remain standing. Also', we have the CN Tower which was the tallest free standing structure for many decades. It was cast in concrete using a slip form back in the 70's. Sadly, the tower is also an example how concrete does not like tension and is shows it through the riddle of cracks which require systemic maintenance. I believe that if they do not encapsulate the Tower in another building eventually it will have to be taken down before it fails.
I remember a documentary on the Great Wall of China, 20+ years ago, where they reported the secret of the mortar longevity was due to 2%-3% sticky rice added to the mix.
Linus Pualing, a winner of TWO Nobel prizes studied and wrote about the chemical bonds in concrete. 1920's.
Lime mortared stone and brick buildings last: cement mortared stone and brick buildings don’t.
Thanks for this, these issues have been on my mind lately as I am a mason.
Very informative video. I read that the Roman pozzolanic concrete used a reactive silica aggregate which would have caused Alkaline-Silicate Reactivity (ASR), resulting in deterioration of the structures over a few decades, however, volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius was added which may have mitigated ASR, along with addition of SCM's as stated in the video. In modern formulation of concrete, ASR was only recognized during the 1940's and adding fly ash or Lithium compounds was eventually discovered as a method of neutralizing this effect.
Shotcrete monolithic dome houses are pretty incredible. FEMA pays for buildings in tornado zones to be built using that tech.
Well done THG!
Well, that cemented my knowledge of concrete very well. Thank you.
8:30 There's a hand-finished concrete street about six blocks from my house in Atlanta. Remarkable surface, and it feels like nothing else inder high-pressure road bicycle tires.
I was at my childhood house not long ago and my name is still in the sidewalk my dad had poured in 1965 right were I left it.
'Aaron the grat'
I learn how to spell great since then.
It comes up at every family event to this day.
I have seen multiple railroad bridges which were constructed from a parallel set of railroad rails set so their webs touched, with concrete poured over them to 6 to 8 inches. One of these bridges is still in use by CSX! Pictures on request.