. . . is named after its inventer, John L. McAdam . . .

I believe that to be incorrect.
It was invented by Edgar Purnell Hooley in 1901
In 1903 he formed the TarMacadam syndicate, which today is a company
named Tarmac Plc.

For more than you ever wanted to know about Tarmac, go he
http://www.tarmac.co.uk/live/welcome.asp?id=0

I know the history quite well as I was a senior manager with Tarmac
International Ltd., for several years.
Here is an extract from their history, as displayed on their corporate
website.


"It was the start of a new century. The Boer War raged, Queen Victoria's
long reign had just ended and roads across the civilised world were just
feeling the first 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 black sticky 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, Hooley obtained a British patent for
a method of mixing slag with tar, calling the material Tarmac.

By June 1903, as Orville and Wilbur Wright were preparing to make
mankind's first powered flight, Hooley formed the TarMacadam Syndicate
Limited and business was brisk. Works had been built in Denby,
Derbyshire, and Hooley also began to look to the American market and
took out a US patent in the same year

But the original syndicate hit financial troubles and the Tarmac story
would have ended there but for the financial backing it received from
Wolverhampton Member of Parliament, Sir Alfred Hickman, who owned a
thriving iron works in Ettingshall.

By 1905, Sir Alfred had become chairman, changed the syndicate's name to
Tarmac Limited, moved the company to a site next to his Staffordshire
steelworks and the orders came flooding in.

Sir Alfred was a great benefactor of Wolverhampton, but he died in 1910
and thousands came to watch his funeral procession.

The task of improving Tarmac's fortunes fell on his son Edward, who
reported a profit in his first year to the princely sum of ?4,742. But
expansion was vital and, in 1913 with profits soaring, Tarmac Limited
became a public company. "

--

Tony Roberts
PP-ASEL
VFR OTT
Night
Cessna 172H C-GICE




In article ,
Jose wrote:



It bugs me not. English evolves through usage, and this usage is
reasonable. Tarmac (short for tarmacadam) is actually a trade name
for the substance; it (the word)is formed from "tar" and "macadam".
Macadam (the paving substance made of crushed stone and a binder,
usually tar) is named after its inventer, John L. McAdam, a Scottish
engineer.

Soon, places paved with tarmac started to be called "tarmac", and
since this began to especially be applied to areas around hangars,
those areas themselves were often called "tarmac" irrespective of what
they were paved with. (I don't know why (or even if) tarmac was the
pavement of choice). It's actually a good word - it fills a niche.

Are you equally bugged by people calling the place where planes are
parked "the ramp" when it's not sloped and doesn't connect a higher
place with a lower place (except in the sense of nothing being
perfectly flat)? Or calling clusters of well known thin vertical
hazards "antenna farms" when nothing is grown or harvested there?

Jose