Building Materials - Their Nature, Properties And Manufacture: A Text-book For Students And Others

PREFACE. FOR many years past I have had in contemplation the preparation of a book in which building materials should be described and their present methods of manufacture explained. As time went on, the need for such a book a modern book at a moderate cost was more and more forcibly brought home to me, owing to the extreme difficulty which my students found in obtaining reliable and recent information. In undertaking to prepare such a book I knew the task would be no light one, and it has proved even more arduous than I had anticipated. For more than eighteen months every moment which I could spare has been devoted to collecting and arranging notes, inter- viewing manufacturers, inspecting works, and to a lesser extent to actually writing the book which is now about to see the light. Atone time the notes alone more than filled a large drawer made for double-elephant paper while hundreds of letters and post-cards have been written for the purpose of obtaining at first-hand the information which is contained in the volume often compressed into tabular form. Wherever possible, too, I have seen things for myself, visiting the slate quarries of North Wales, the stone quarries of Somerset, Gloucestershire and Rutland- shire, the iron and steel works of Middlesbrough, the terra-cotta works of Ruabon, Portland cement works at Greenhitheand near Leamington, and numerous brickfields and lime-kilns, and important manufacturing premises, in and around London. Wherever I have visited, and however searching my enquiries have been, I have been received with the utmost ...