Set in Stone

Century-old book is an ode to cement

By Seth Jovaag

Say this about William Radford: The man loved cement, and he wasn’t afraid to admit it.

For the Chicago architect, the future of this “most lasting” of building materials knew few bounds. In the preface to “Cement and How to Use it,” his 1910 work, he announces, “There are many who … are already proclaiming that the Age of Cement is upon us.”

Count Radford among the believers.

Other materials — wood, marble, granite, even steel — require special care if they are to “withstand the ravages of time,” he writes. But concrete — sweet, goopy concrete, and by proxy, its primary ingredient, Portland cement — “stands out alone as the one which can truly be called permanent.”

At times, Radford’s lofty prose gets away from him. This is, after all, a how-to manual. But you wouldn’t know it from this one-sentence paean, which is (graciously) edited for length:

“Stronger and more durable than any natural stone, unaffected by fire or moisture, capable of adaptation to any position or condition, workable by unskilled labor … vermin-proof, cleanly, and comparatively inexpensive, it ranks among the foremost of the valuable gifts to mankind from the treasure-house of modern scientific and technical research.”

Like I said — the man loved his cement.

Yet while Radford’s gushing style may clash with our 21st century tastes, you’ve got to give him credit. He was onto something.

After all, when Radford penned this 369-page tome, cement and concrete were still emerging on the American scene. Before carports, before interstates, before curb-and-gutter and tilt-up construction, concrete in 1910 was shaking off an image problem, says Radford, who proudly reports that his subject, like a true hero, “has triumphantly risen above prejudice and doubt.”

Less than a century later, annual U.S. Portland cement consumption has soared beyond 100 million metric tons, ten times what was produced in Radford’s day, according to the Portland Cement Association. And in China — concrete’s biggest customer — consumption has topped 1 billion metric tons, according to a 2006 study of mineral commodities by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Maybe, as Radford suggests, we are in the Age of Cement.

Which begs the question: How did we get here?

To which Radford — no surprise — has an answer.

In his first chapter, Radford turns historian, unveiling how the ancient Egyptians — “while the earth was still young” — used a crude concrete to solidify the upper reaches of the pyramids. He also tips his hat to the
Romans, who mixed broken stone and a cement of “slaked lime and volcanic ash” to build, among other things, their famous aqueducts and the dome of the Pantheon.

Perhaps the biggest nod goes to Joseph Aspdin, a brick mason of Leeds, who in 1824 developed Portland cement (named for the famous stone quarried on the Isle of Portland in the English Channel). Its arrival in the United States in the 1860s was a pivotal moment, and with the advent of using steel bars to create reinforced concrete in the 1880s and 1890s, cement entered a new age, Radford argues.

As the 19th century closed, cement’s many uses — “from the skyscraper to the one-story garage, from palatial residence to simple cottage” — were growing more evident.

And that’s where the book takes us. As the title indicates, Radford eventually moves to the practical.

After a handy glossary and detailed guide on mixing and measuring concrete, Radford launches into dozens of descriptions of how to build anything from a chicken house to a chimney to a “cyclone cellar.” There are detailed drawings and cookbook-like instructions (to build blocks that won’t discolor in your hearth, for example, fire your cement at 900 degrees and mix with one part sand and three parts coarse sand).

It’s here that the book can feel primitive. After all, who fires their own cement anymore?

In 1910, there was no air-entrained concrete to adapt to hard freezes, no plasticizing agents to make concrete more fluid and easy to use.

Likewise, grandiose concrete projects like the Hoover Dam (1935) or the nation’s interstate system were decades away. And even with Radford’s devotion to cement, he probably never envisioned the CITIC Plaza in Guangzhou, China, which at 1,283 feet is the world’s tallest reinforced concrete skyscraper, according to Emporis, a multinational real-estate research company.

But again, Radford was onto something.

Accurately, he predicted that once the possibilities of concrete were known to the “middle” classes, the sky was the limit. Today, what true American hasn’t whipped up a batch of Ready-Mix? And those concrete trucks with the revolving drums are as familiar to us as the roads we drive.

Again, Radford has to be forgiven for waxing dramatic. Concrete, he argues, can transform mankind. A better understanding of it would, at least indirectly, “make better homes, better municipalities, and a more progressive citizenship.”

In other words, concrete is here to save the world.