Concrete is one of the most well-known and used building materials in the world. For thousands of years, concrete has been used in ways, shapes and forms to build the world we know today. Everything from the streets you drive on to the foundations of your houses are built with concrete in mind. Let’s learn a little bit more about what concrete is and what it can do for you.
What Exactly is Concrete?
Concrete is a type of composite building material. It’s made with a granular filler within a hard matrix binder. The aggregate – or the filler – is mixed into the binder, often cement, to create concrete. There are a variety of concretes on the market but most follow the same basic principle of needing an aggregate and a binder to work and set properly.
Historians believe that concrete, or the basic concept of it, was first developed during the Roman Empire. Ancient Romans used concrete to create arenas, pantheons and other structures throughout the empire. In fact, the Roman Coliseum, was built mostly of concrete and the Pantheon still is considered the world’s largest concrete dome.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, concrete fell to the wayside as did many things related to their culture. Until the middle of the 18th century, concrete was rarely used until it was re-developed and improved upon what the Romans used during this time. During the mid-18th century, many builders began experimenting with different concrete mixtures, developing everything from cement to what we now know as asphalt.
Modern concrete came out of a discovery by Joseph Aspdin. This was in 1824. By 1948, Joseph Monier had evolved modern concrete into reinforced concrete. In 1889, the first concrete reinforced bridge was designed, built and put into use. Once concrete was shown to be a safe and effective building material in the modern area, it became popular to use in all forms of construction and building.
Concrete is still the most widely used building material in the world. Without concrete, structures would have no foundations, roads would collapse and building as we know it would be fundamentally different. You travel on concrete every day whether driving, walking or just resting at home.