ABOUT PORTLAND CEMENT

Portland cement is “the finely pulverized product resulting from the calcination to incipient fusion of an intimate mixture of properly proportioned argillaceous and calcareous materials and to which no addition greater than 3 per cent has been made subsequent to calcination.”

That, in a word, is the keynote of H. Colin Campbell’s “How to Use Cement for Concrete Construction.”  In case you should never read any more of the book, you would have that.

But to the reader who is not satisfied with this taste of the secret of cement construction and who reads on into Mr. Campbell’s work, there is revealed a veritable mine of information.  And in the light of the recent turn of events one might even call it significant. (Any turn of events will do.)

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The first chapter is given over to a plea for concrete.  Judging from the claims made for concrete by Mr. Campbell, it will accomplish everything that a return to Republican administration would do, and wouldn’t be anywhere near so costly.  It will make your barn fireproof; it will insure clean milk for your children; it will provide a safe housing for your automobile.  Farm prosperity and concrete go hand in hand.

In case there are any other members of society who have been with me in thinking that Portland cement is a product of Portland, Me., or Portland, Ore., it might as well be stated right here and now that America had nothing to do with the founding of the industry, and that the lucky Portland is an island off the south coast of England.

It was a bright sunny afternoon in May, 1824, when Joseph Aspdin, an intelligent bricklayer of Leeds, England, was carelessly calcining a mixture of limestone and clay, as bricklayers often do on their days off, that he suddenly discovered, on reducing the resulting clinker to a powder, that this substance, on hardening, resembled nothing so much as the yellowish-gray stone found in the quarries on the Isle of Portland.  (How Joe knew what grew on the Isle of Portland when his home was in Leeds is not explained.  Maybe he spent his summers at the Portland House, within three minutes of the bathing beach.)

At any rate, on discovering the remarkable similarity between the mess he had cooked up and Portland stone, he called to his wife and said:  “Eunice, come here a minute!  What does this remind you of?”

The usually cheerful brow of Eunice Aspdin clouded for the fraction of a second.

“That night up at Bert and Edna’s?” she ventured.

“No, no, my dear,” said the intelligent bricklayer, slightly irked.  “Anyone could see that this here substance is a dead ringer for Portland stone, and I am going to make heaps and heaps of it and call it ‘Portland cement.’  It is little enough that I can do for the old island.”

And so that’s how Portland cement was named.  Rumor hath it that the first Portland cement in America was made at Allentown, Pa., in 1875, but I wouldn’t want to be quoted as having said that.  But I will say that the total annual production in this country is now over 90,000,000 barrels.