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Show CONCRETE IS ANCIENT HIGHWAY MATERIAL The first known concrete highway was laid down by the Romans in England, between Westchester and . London. Excavations uncovered several sections, in excelent condition. condi-tion. Apparently the material was a natural cement mixed with pebbles and worked into a roadbed about twelve inches thick. The' art seems to have been lost, for nearly two thousand years, the next example being in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1S72, when some concrete con-crete pavements, still in use and good condition, were made. In our own country, Bcllefontaine, Ohio, gets credit for being the first municipality to experiment with cement ce-ment streets, in 1S93. But it is really real-ly Wayne County, Michigan, the Detroit De-troit automobile factory region, which made the concrete highway-known highway-known to the nation. This early e- periment was in 1907. In 1!0'.! less than half a millir-Ti'wiuare yards of concrete were laid (p?rhaps fifty miles), while in 1021 more than sixty million square vans we: 'J (more than 7,000 mile?. One of the advantg'es of concrete con-crete is the low cos ' -)f hauling, ifs surface being less resistant to tractive trac-tive effort than ar.y we know. Dynamometer Dy-namometer measurements show that tractive force required to move a wheeled ton of weight on a level road are, for concrete, 32. ! poun .-; for asphalt, 77.7 pounds; for bri-1:, 51.8 pounds, and for earth, 13-1.7 pounds. A taxi company so situated that it drove one set of cars almost entire! v on dirt roads and another set almost al-most entirely on concrete roads, reports re-ports that it costs 2.1 cents less per mile to operate the taxis on the cement ce-ment road than on the dirt roads. There are 12.000.000 automobiles in the country. If they average the low amount of 3.000 miles each per year, the total miles driven is "fi.-000,000.000. "fi.-000,000.000. At two cents a mile I sving. the sum of S720.000.nnn a year could go towards huilding hard su-- : face roads, which income would j build 2,000 miles of permanent hig'i-,8 ways every year! l f .Li. . |