Materials

Concrete

Citation Formats

General Reference

Technology and Engineering Atlas. "Concrete." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://technology.interactiveatlas.org/materials/concrete.

APA Style

Technology and Engineering Atlas. (n.d.). Concrete. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://technology.interactiveatlas.org/materials/concrete

BibTeX

@misc{technologyandengineeringatlas-concrete,
  author = {Technology and Engineering Atlas},
  title = {Concrete},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://technology.interactiveatlas.org/materials/concrete},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Concrete is a composite building material made of coarse and fine aggregate, typically sand and gravel, bound together with a paste of cement and water that hardens over time. Roman engineers developed a highly durable concrete using volcanic ash that let them build structures such as the Pantheon dome and harbor works that survive two thousand years later. The material fell out of common use in Europe after the fall of Rome, was reintroduced with the invention of Portland cement in 1824 by Joseph Aspdin, and was further transformed by reinforced concrete, which embeds steel bars in the concrete to add tensile strength, in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Facts

Disputed

Origin Year

300 BCE 1

Roman concrete, opus caementicium, was in wide structural use from around the third century BCE; still older Nabataean hydraulic-cement-like materials are attested from roughly 6500 BCE, and the modern Portland cement that underlies most concrete poured today dates only to 1824.

Primary Use

Foundations, structural framing, roads, dams and nearly every large scale civil engineering work. 1

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Cement

Cement is the binding agent that, mixed with water and aggregate, hardens into concrete.

Civil Engineering

Fazlur Rahman Khan

Khan first proved the tubular structural system in reinforced concrete, on Chicago DeWitt-Chestnut Apartments in 1963, before developing its steel form.

Source A History of TechnologyCharles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors

Portland Cement

Portland cement is the standard binder used to make modern concrete.

Source Joseph Aspdin Patent No. 5022, 1824 (cementkilns.co.uk)

Steel

Steel reinforcing bar embedded in concrete gives reinforced concrete tensile strength that plain concrete lacks.