It
was the start of a new century. The Boer War raged,
Queen Victoria's long rein had just ended and
the civilised world was starting to feel the effects
of the new age of the motor car. The search was
on for a material that would create better road
surfaces. . .
As
if by chance, on a road near Denby ironworks in
Derbyshire in 1901, the county surveyor of Nottingham
- Edgar Purnell Hooley noticed a barrel of tar
had fallen from a dray and burst open.
To
avoid a nuisance, someone from the ironworks had
thoughtfully covered the sticky black mess with
waste slag from nearby furnaces. . . and the world's
first tarmacadam surface was born by accident!
Hooley
noticed that the patch of road, which had been
unintentionally re-surfaced, was dust-free and
hadn't been rutted by traffic. So he set to work
and by the following year, 1902, Hooley obtained
a British patent for a method of mixing slag with
tar, naming the material Tarmac.
By
June 1903, Hooley formed the TarMacadam Syndicate
Limited, the origin of what is now known as The
Tarmac Group, the UK's leading supplier of building
materials. |
