It is something that we see in virtually every town and city across the world. Tarmac is a household name, and something that everyone is familiar with, with it being used for road surfaces and driveways wherever you are. But what you may not know is that a Welshman was the one who invented it.
Edgar Purnell Hooley was an inventor who was born in Swansea in June 1860 and worked as a civil engineer. He entered into a business partnership called Lean and Hooley with Francis Lean, an architects and surveyors in Neath. By 1884 he went on to become a surveyor with Stow-on-the-Wold Highway Board and then took up a similar position with Maidstone Highway Board before he moved to Nottingham, where he was appointed Nottinghamshire County Council's county surveyor in 1889.
And it was while working there that he made the discovery by accident. Whilst working in Denby, Derbyshire in 1901, he discovered a smooth stretch of road and decided to investigate what happened. He spoke to people living locally and discovered that a barrel of tar had burst onto the road and that waste slag had been poured over it to cover it up. It smoothed and solidified on the road with no dust and rutting, as was common at the time. For pictures of times gone by sign up to our nostalgia newsletter here.
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John McAdam had originally created the method of using crushed stone road surfaces, with the name of tarmacadam derived from him. But he was not able to create a surface where stones stuck together. Mr Hooley took what he saw and spent a year working on a method to replicate it elsewhere. By 1902 he had patented a process of adding slag to heated tar and breaking stones within the mixture to create a smooth, sold surface. He made Radcliffe Road in Nottingham the world’s first Tarmac road, covering five miles of it with his mixture.
He looked to sell his creation a year later, in 1903, creating the Tar Macadam Syndicate, but the business was eventually sold to the MP for Wolverhampton, Sir Alfred Hickman, the owner of a steelworks which produced the slag that was used to produce Tarmac. He himself relaunched the company in 1905 and the rest is history.
Mr Hooley went on to do military service, achieving the rank of Quartermaster and Honorary Captain for the 8th Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment, before retiring in October 1920. He died at his home in Oxford in 1942. These days you'll see Tarmac literally wherever you go with companies using it in huge quantities. So next time you're driving along take extra pride in knowing it was the ingenuity of a Welshman man which made the road run smooth. Join our WhatsApp news community here for the latest breaking news.
