Concrete is the most widely used artificial building material in the world. More than one point five billion tons of cement are produced annually throughout the world and about forty percent is used in China. The concrete made from this cement exceeds ten billion tons per year. If you can imagine how much concrete has been used over the centuries, that would be mind blowing. The history of cement and concrete goes back more than five thousand years. If you trace the known history of geological cement, it goes back about twelve million years.
However, let’s stick to when man was involved and go back to Egypt. Surely the Egyptians would have liked the option that we have these days of creating the pyramid using some precast concrete forms from Las Vegas. The ancient Egyptians used mud and straw along with plaster to bind their dry bricks together. Lime mortar was used to join the large stone. Around the same time, the Chinese used cement materials between the bamboo in their ships and when building the Great Wall.
The Greeks were the first to discover how hydraulic mortars worked in both air and water. This was used in waterproof tank construction in much the same way as today’s Hawaiian precast concrete uses similar concrete in fully submerged precast forms. The Romans then refined mortars and are credited with inventing concrete by adding broken brick aggregate into a mixture of lime putty with volcanic ash or brick dust. Some of his work can still be seen in the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Great Roman Baths and many more outstanding examples of how durable this new type of building material really is.
Unfortunately, after the fall of the Roman Empire, it seems that the production of concrete and cement stopped. It was not really recovered until the 17th century. Apparently the first concrete structure to be built since the Romans was the Eddystone Lighthouse in England. The first concrete bridge was built in 1818 in Souillac France. Then in England in 1824, a man named Joseph Aspdin invented Portland cement. This cement was named Portland because it resembled the stones quarried on the Isle of Portland. It is still used today in products such as a precast concrete utility vault.