John Loudon McAdam (1756-1836)
28th April 2011, Page 33
28th April 2011
Page 33
Page 33, 28th April 2011
— John Loudon McAdam (1756-1836)
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Without John Loudon McAdam, our roads would still be dirt tracks. Well, perhaps not, but the Scottish engineer is the man responsible for “tarmacadam”, a multi-layered road surface made from a base of large stones with a top layer of crushed stone and gravel. McAdam’s radical new approach to road building also saw the introduction of the camber to improve drainage. However, asphalt roads as we now know them originated in 1901 when Edgar Purnell Hooley, the county surveyor of Nottingham, noticed that someone had covered the spillage from a barrel of tar with waste slag from a nearby furnace. In 1902, Hooley patented the method of mixing slag with tar, naming it Tarmac and forming the Tarmac Group a year later.