Concrete is an essential part of most homes and businesses. It is a perishable product that requires skilled and experienced craftsman to place and finish it properly. Concrete has great longevity and superior durability. It is an art form all it’s own.
Listed below are a few examples of our concrete work done for our clientele.
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For your concrete knowledge enjoyment listed below are several unknown fact in regards to concrete and concrete related items.
Advent of the ready-mixed truck…
Machines and methods to batch and mix the materials used in concrete paving were just being developed at the turn of the 20th century.
In particular, a steam-powered concrete “paver” that mixed concrete onsite and moved with the other paving machines as the work progressed gained wide acceptance as the preferred method of producing concrete for pavement.
At first, wheelbarrows were used to “batch” and load the paver’s skip hoist. Five-ton dump trucks would haul the sand and stone to the work site and dump the materials in piles along the roadside. Then the workmen would hand-shovel the materials into wheelbarrows that also served as volumetric measures to load the skip hoist for the two-bag (about 11 cubic feet) steam-powered concrete mixer (paver).
Bags of cement also were spaced along the roadside and hand-dumped into the skip hoist in proportion to the wheelbarrow loads and batch size. A water pipe usually was laid the entire length of the job with multiple outlets to provide water for the mix. It was a slow, back-breaking process, but it got the job done and produced many concrete roads of acceptable quality for the early lightweight cars and trucks.
Concrete ships throughout history…
The oldest known concrete ship was a dingy built by Joseph Louis Lambot in Southern France in 1848 and featured in the 1855 World’s Fair.
In the 1890s, an engineer in Italy named Carlo Gabellini built barges and small ships out of concrete; the most famous being the Liguria. On August 2, 1917, N.K. Fougner of Norway launched the first ocean-going concrete ship—an 84-foot-long boat named Namsenfjord. In the 1917, the Violette was built and currently is used as a boating clubhouse on the Medway River in England. This makes her the oldest concrete ship still afloat.
In 1917, the United State finally entered World War I and steel became scarce while the demand for ships went up. Businessman W. Lesie Comyn formed the San Francisco Ship Building Co., Oakland, Calif., to begin constructing concrete ships. The first American concrete ship, a steamer named the S. S. Faith, was launched March 18, 1918. She cost $750,000 to build. She was used to carry cargo for trade until 1921, when she was sold and scrapped as a breakwater in Cuba.
With the advent of World War II, the U.S. government contracted McCloskey & Co., Philadelphia, Pa., to construct a fleet of 24 concrete ships. Innovations in cement mixing and composition made these ships stronger than the previous attempts. After the war, several of the ships were turned into a floating breakwater in Canada and 10 more were sunk as a breakwater in Virginia.
The Very First Concrete…
Everyone knows that all roads lead to Rome, but lesser known is that 5300 miles of those roads were built from concrete.
From 300 B.C. to 476 A.D., the Romans used pozzolana cement from Pozzuoli, Italy, to build the Appian Way, as well as the Roman baths, the Coliseum and Pantheon, and the Pont du Gard aqueduct in southern France.The mix consisted of small gravel and coarse sand mixed with hot lime and water and horsehair to reduce shrinkage. That also is when the world saw admixtures in their most primitive forms of animal fat, milk, and blood.
Ancient Chinese used cementitious materials to hold bamboo together in boats and in the Great Wall of China, and Egyptians used lime mortars and gypsum’s while building the pyramids. History also suggests that Assyrians and Babylonians used clay as a bonding material.