When was pavement made

One significant find was the Seyssel asphalt deposit discovered in in the Rhone Valley in France. In , an asphalt-mastic pavement, composed of a mixture of 93 percent Seyssel asphalt and 7 percent aggregate was laid as a foot pavement at Pont Morand, Lyons, France, and was also used for surfacing steps.

In June , the first mastic-asphalt pavement was laid at Pont Royal, Paris. It was composed of Seyssel asphalt. Later, in , Seyssel asphalt was introduced in London for constructing foot paths. The earliest case on record of rock asphalt being used in the U.

Seyssel asphalt was used. The first record of an asphaltic road being constructed in the s was from Paris to Perpignan, France, in , using modern macadam construction with Val de Travers rock asphalt.

Limited marketing of asphalt from the deposit began in the late s and early s. In , Swiss engineer M. Merian observed that the fragments of rock asphalt that fell from the carts transporting asphalt from the mine at Val de Travers became compressed in the summer months under the cart wheels into a crude asphalt pavement. It was maintained in good condition for sixty years. It was composed of Val de Travers rock asphalt. Historians credit Belgian chemist E. DeSmedt for laying the first rock asphalt roadway in the U.

In , he constructed a small experimental strip with European asphalt opposite the City Hall in Newark, New Jersey. A year later, in , several asphalt-like pavements were laid in Washington, D. The pavements were composed of a mix of crushed rock and sand with coal tar pitch and creosote oil. These pavements provided good service for over 15 years. Then, in , a larger stretch, composed of Val de Travers rock asphalt, was laid at Union Square.

The first sheet asphalt pavement composed of Trinidad Lake asphalt laid in the U. Val de Travers asphalt was used from the Capitol building to Sixth Street. Trinidad Lake asphalt was used for the remainder of the pavement. There is little doubt that asphalt has had a transformative effect on the American landscape. That fact became extremely clear in when the Federal Highway Administration reported that 2,, miles of American roadways were paved with some variety of asphalt.

The asphalt road that Laura Ingalls Wilder encountered more than years ago may bear little resemblance to the roads of today. Unique Paving Materials Blog.

A brief look at how asphalt pavement has transformed the landscape Today, asphalt paving has become a sight so common, we seemingly take it for granted. And so with that in mind, we thought it would be fun to explore a brief timeline of the history of asphalt: B. His contemporary, John Loudon McAdam, used broken stone joined to form a hard surface to build a Scottish turnpike.

DeSmedt laid the first true asphalt pavement in the U. The Cummer Company opened the first central hot mix production facilities in the U. The first asphalt patent was filed by Nathan B. The paving of streets with macadam, blocks or bricks represented a vital development in the modernization of cities beginning in the nineteenth century. It also represented the product of extensive and often highly skilled human labor.

But making street pavement successful went well beyond its installation. From the preparatory harvesting and transporting of materials and their shaping into usable pavements to their maintenance through the prominent efforts of street cleaning crews, human labor was the historical agent shaping the interrelationship of advancements in modes of transit and the evolution of surface pavements. That tradition gained renewed importance with the spread of the historic preservation movement to street pavement in the s, which highlighted the importance of skilled labor needed to restore historic street surfaces.

Before modern synthetic sheet asphalt assumed its dominion over streets and highways in the s, North American cities employed a wide array of street pavement materials. The remarkable breadth of materials was matched by the labor skills required to create and install them. Beginning with cobblestones in New York in the seventeenth century and in Philadelphia by the early eighteenth century, most cities experimented with diverse materials beginning in the s depending on their geographic location, economic resources and needs.

The earliest municipal efforts to pave streets in American cities sought the most expedient and affordable materials and involved more brute muscle than skilled craftsmanship.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, East Coast port cities made use of cobblestones, irregular naturally rounded stones that arrived in the holds of ships as ballast.

To make room for the heavy loads of raw materials for export, the ballast stones were manually removed from the ships and typically deposited on a wharf, where they became a ready resource for street pavement. Princess Street in Alexandria, Virginia, believed to have been installed by Hessian soldiers, is typical in comprising a wide variety of stone types and sizes laid in a loose and random pattern figures 1 and 2.

Achieving road surfaces better suited to the growing number of wheeled vehicles in industrial cities would require more skilled and intensive labor.

Scottish inventor John Loudon McAdam developed a layered pavement, macadam, as it came to be known, that involved workers breaking stones to a consistent size able to be passed through a two-inch ring figure 3. The rule of thumb for laborers was that no rock should be too large to fit into their mouth.

Constructing the roadbed itself was equally labor intensive, with a layer of broken stone followed by a binder layer of some kind, such as sand, lime or bitumen, then compacted with a roller. Some macadam roads involved multiple such layers. First used in London in and in the United States by , macadam enjoyed extensive use throughout the nineteenth century and even into the first decades of the twentieth century due to its relative affordability.

Louis figure 4. Perhaps because of the relative ease with which it can be shaped and its availability in many regions across North America, wood enjoyed early widespread use as a pavement material beginning in the s. Whether cut into planks or rectangular or hexagonal blocks, wood pavements required not only the labor of loggers to fell trees and workers at saw mills, but were the first North American pavements to require the craftsmanship of carpenters or masons at the point of installation figure 5.

The use of wood cylinders, such as those in Detroit figure 6 , simplified the shaping process, but necessitated careful sorting and placement of pieces of differing diameters to minimize the spaces between them.

Rectangular Belgian blocks, usually of granite but also of sandstone in the Midwest, emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as the pavement of choice for industrial areas where heavy traffic was most common figure 9. Shaped by arduous hand chiseling, Belgian blocks are generally rectangular in shape and often vary in size, reflecting the manual-labor nature of its production — as seen in the paving of The Esplanade in Toronto in figures 10 and