Welcome back to a New Year and, rather scarily, a new decade. ‘Twas a whole ten years ago since we were worrying about the Millennium Bug. The only hiccup I personally encountered was one ageing laptop used to remotely monitor an early nineties CP system that lost the plot and had to be put down. Apologies for the inadvertent data handling pun (lost the plot, geddit?), although anyone who spotted it would be poor company at a party and you certainly wouldn’t want to get stuck in a lift with them.

My photograph this time features me and some concrete with a combined age of one thousand nine hundred and thirty six years. It is, of course, the Pantheon in Rome and the large grey object is part of the Roman concrete roof, still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. The smaller grey object is me and I’ve gone a little more arty this time, although I’ve resisted the standard ‘halo’ shot with the oculus circling my head.

Talk of ancient concrete takes me back to Albania and my recent visit I referred to last time. If you recall, we were there to help establish a maintenance regime for their bridges and part of this involved a series of training courses to familiarise them with the concept of asset management and the basics of structural degradation and repair. Somewhere near the start of a talk on reinforced concrete there was a throwaway line regarding the oldest known concrete dating from 5,600 BC in Lepenski Vir on the banks of the Danube in Eastern Serbia, less than a day’s drive away from where I was speaking. This would normally induce little more than a momentary gasp of disbelief (I may be building my part up a little) before hitting them with a continuous timeline of development that takes you through the Egyptians and Romans to the introduction of Portland cement in the 1840’s. Pretty exciting stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Unfortunately, rather than the mild response I might have reasonably expected (after the slight pause for translation), one particular delegate decide to take umbrage, or the Albanian equivalent, and leapt to his feet protesting violently about such an outrageous claim. Having established through the translator that he hadn’t had a funny turn or been stung by a wasp, it transpired he was outraged at such a ridiculous claim and demanded immediate independent justification. You may be surprised and disappointed to learn I had forgotten to pack my Albanian translation of ‘A History of Concrete’ and so had to attempt to placate him with personal assurances on the veracity of my affirmations, which probably didn’t help the translator much.

Initially, as you might suspect, I was concerned he had been put out by the suggestion that a neighbouring country had initiated such an important technology. It would appear not. Being a proud and experienced civil engineer he seemed most bothered that the honour of such a development was not being heaped upon John Smeaton, the 18th century father of civil engineering and undoubted contributor to modern concrete technology. I suspect the fact that the Albanian for concrete is ‘beton’, a relatively modern term used by the French, did not help. Thankfully he eventually agreed to differ and sat down to sullenly scan the remainder of my presentation for further glaring errors.
Just as well I didn’t mention the Pantheon roof!

Members Area

Institute Technical Forum