Road Roller

A road roller is a compactor-type engineering vehicle used to compact soil, gravel, concrete or asphalt during the construction of roads and building foundations. The earliest road rollers were horse-drawn implements adapted from farm equipment, and because effective compaction depends heavily on weight, self-propelled machines began replacing horse-drawn ones from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. Steam-powered rollers became the dominant technology, with single-cylinder machines used for base compaction and double-cylinder machines, popular from around 1910, used for rolling hot surfaces; some American road-building companies still used steamrollers into the 1950s and some British units remained in service into the early 1970s, before kerosene, gasoline and then diesel engines took over, and virtually every road roller built today runs on diesel power, even though the machines are still commonly called steamrollers regardless of how they are actually powered.