3000 BC
The Egyptians began to use mud mixed with straw to bind dried bricks. They also used gypsum mortars and mortars of lime in the building of the pyramids.
The Chinese used cementitious materials in the construction of the Great Wall.
800 BC
The Greeks used lime mortars that were much harder than later Roman mortars. This material was also in evidence in Crete and Cyprus at this time.
300 BC
The Babylonians and Assyrians used bitumen to bind stones and bricks together.
Ancient Rome
The Romans frequently used broken brick aggregate embedded in a mixture of lime putty with brick dust or volcanic ash. They built a wide variety of structures that incorporated stone and concrete, including roads, aqueducts, temples and palaces.
1200 to 1500
The quality of cementing materials deteriorated and even the use of concrete died out during The Middle Ages as the art of using burning lime and pozzolan (admixture) was lost, but it was later reintroduced in the 1300s.
1414
The manuscripts of the Roman Pollio Vitruvius are discovered in a Swiss monastery reviving general interest in concrete.
1774
John Smeaton had found that combining quicklime with other materials created an extremely hard material that could be used to bind together other materials. He used this knowledge to build the first concrete structure since the Ancient Romans.
1816
The first unreinforced concrete bridge was built at Souillac, France.
1902
August Perret designs and builds an apartment building in Paris that uses what he called "the trabeated system for reinforced concrete". It was widely studied and imitated, and deeply influenced architecture and concrete construction for decades.
1914
The Panama Canal was opened after decades of construction. It features three pairs of concrete locks with floors as thick as 20 feet, and walls as much as 60 feet thick at the bottom.
1921
The vast, parabolic airship hangars at Orly airport in Paris were completed.
1933
U.S. Penitentiary Alcatraz was opened. The first inmates were the prison work gang that built it.
1973
The Opera House in Sydney, Australia opened. It's distinctive concrete peaks quickly became a symbol for the city.
1993
The John F. Kennedy Museum in Boston was completed. The dramatic concrete and glass structure was designed by renowned architect I. M. Pei.
Today
Ghacem Limited provides consistent quality and affordable cement.
