Reporters saying "TARMAC" how stupid!!

. . . 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

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

I believe that to be incorrect.
It was invented by Edgar Purnell Hooley in 1901

The three dots above left out the crucial information. I did not
claim Tarmac was invented by John, just Macadam.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary's etymology, Macadam was
invented by John L. McAdam. It used crushed and graded stones for a
road surface. What Hooley did (according to your quote) was to add
tar to the mix.

Jose
--
Money: What you need when you run out of brains.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

Hi Jose
I was simply correcting the statement.

Here is McAdam's role:
In 1816 the engineer John McAdam was appointed General Surveyor of
Bristol Roads. A Scot who had moved to Bristol, he had worked out on a
new approach to road construction. He instructed that stones should be
graded and laid in three levels, with the smallest stones crushed and
laid as a top surface. This ensured a smoother well-drained finish.
Such roads were said to be 'macadamised'. The technique revolutionised
the local turnpike roads, allowing swifter and safer travel.

Here is what you said:
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.

In fact MacAdam did not add any binder (that was the error that I
referred to) - he simply used 3 different grades of crushed stones. And
his method was not called Tarmac, or Tarmacadam, it was called Macadam.

Quite honestly I don't care what anyone calls it. It's just that, as
probably the only person in rec. aviation who actually knows the history
of Tarmac in great detail, having worked for them and having explained
the history many times to their clients, I decided to help clarify the
issue.

HTH

Tony

--

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



In article ,
Jose wrote:

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

I believe that to be incorrect.
It was invented by Edgar Purnell Hooley in 1901

The three dots above left out the crucial information. I did not
claim Tarmac was invented by John, just Macadam.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary's etymology, Macadam was
invented by John L. McAdam. It used crushed and graded stones for a
road surface. What Hooley did (according to your quote) was to add
tar to the mix.

Jose

In fact MacAdam did not add any binder (that was the error that I
referred to)

Thanks for the correction. Always good to have real expertise. (but
it would have been helpful to have quoted the actual mistake, as
above).

Jose
--
Money: What you need when you run out of brains.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

On Fri, 07 Jan 2005 01:13:05 GMT, tony roberts
wrote:

. . . 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.

Macadam or MacAdam devised the system of laying down small or crushed
stones to make a weatherproof road.

Tarmacadam improved on this by using tar as a binder, making the world
safe for the bumper-to-bumper traffic we now know and love. (Oh, I
know there's concrete, but that's not much used in the cold climates
like mine.)

On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 16:50:23 GMT, "Colin W Kingsbury"
wrote:

It might just be an affectation,

Oh, it's definitely an affectation. I said "Cambridge," but what I
really meant was Harvard. I doubt you would hear it at MIT.

In article ,
Cub Driver wrote:

It might just be an affectation,

Oh, it's definitely an affectation. I said "Cambridge," but what I
really meant was Harvard. I doubt you would hear it at MIT.

don't be so sure...

--
Bob Noel
looking for a sig the lawyers will like

Cub Driver wrote:

On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 16:50:23 GMT, "Colin W Kingsbury"
wrote:

It might just be an affectation,

Oh, it's definitely an affectation. I said "Cambridge," but what I
really meant was Harvard. I doubt you would hear it at MIT.


Well I work at the Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge
and we work wiht MIT all the time. The only time I've heard words such as
"lorry" were from foreign born folks.

Never heard a native New Englander use such terms.

Gregg

--
Replicas of 15th-19th century nautical navigational instruments:

http://home.comcast.net/~saville/backstaffhome.html

Restoration of my 82 year old Herreshoff S-Boat sailboat:

http://home.comcast.net/~saville/SBOATrestore.htm

Steambending FAQ with photos:

http://home.comcast.net/~saville/Steambend.htm

"Chris" wrote in message news:cri2kh$s47

It bugs me, too. Most ramps are concrete, not tar-macadam, but the
newsies
think that saying tarmac makes them sound knowledgeable.

Anybody ever bothered to correct the newsies? This would be interesting to
most of them.
For example, editors reject terms like "Dumpster" and "Velcro." Meanwhile,
Thermos is so old that it's acceptable to call any such container a thermos,
just as Webster's Dictionary can be published by anybody. It may also be
acceptable to call any paved surface upon which aircraft operate a "tarmac,"
and/or this acceptability in print may vary from country to country.

Probably not worth getting all het up about. If they called the surface
pavement, or ashphalt, they'd likely get a ration of crap from hotheaded
aviators telling them the term is "tarmac." (Also, by way of trivia, cement
is what is used to make concrete. A sidewalk is concrete, not cement, but
that's been misused into pointlessness by the average American just as the
term "nauseous" has.)

Meanwhile, most critics of the media don't know the proper useage of an
apostrophe or comma. And, keep your eye on pilots' misuse of the word
"hanger." (It's "hangar.")

-c

"Bob Fry" wrote in message

Reasons why the English language is so hard to learn:

Nauseous originally applied to that which causes nausea. It's been so
misused that lexicographers punted and included a second definition which is
equal to nauseated.

Our language is difficult because it's a living language, and people
interpret to mean that however the common folk use it, that's how it should
be. My generation destroyed the word "awesome." Werd, dawgs.

Why do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck
and send cargo by ship?

....park on a driveway and drive on a parkway? And why in hell is it
called a "hot water heater"?