The Global Spread of Street Pavement Materials and Technology, 1820–1920

Long before the automobile, municipal leaders around the world sought to modernize city streets to improve public hygiene, safety and transportation. Issues of resource availability made trade networks, often global in scope, a defining factor in how municipal engineers and city politicians selected street pavements. From the early nineteenth century until the 1920s, when horse-drawn vehicles dominated, cities experimented with a wide range of materials to solve the problem of a durable and effective street pavement, balancing cost, availability, and performance. A succession of pavement types spread around the industrializing world resulting from technological innovations and increased access to natural resources. The earliest modern pavement employed in many cities during the nineteenth century were naturally rounded cobblestones that arrived in port towns as discarded ship ballast – the detritus of global trade networks. Affordable Telford and Macadam pavements involving layers of gravel, invented in the United Kingdom in the early nineteenth century, quickly spread worldwide. But durability and dust problems demanded more solid pavements. While cut stone pavements like granite Belgian blocks were strongest, the deafening noise caused by metal horse hooves clattering on such surfaces popularized wood as a silent, though less permanent alternative. Plank roads, introduced in Russia, spread to Canada by the 1830s and to the United States a decade later. Wood blocks from Australia, Canada, and Scandinavia supplied cities often half a world away. Smooth, durable, and relatively quiet asphalt, first used in Paris in the 1850s, offered great promise, but was very expensive, relying on natural material collected by hand from Trinidad. Worse, like wood, it absorbed horse urine. Vitrified bricks would predominate in North America after 1880, but prohibitive shipping costs and noise pollution presented challenges. Such trade-offs defined pavement decisions until the 1920s, when petroleum-based asphalt prevailed

Civil engineering · Forensic engineering · Transport engineering · American Environmental and Regional History · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Engineering · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies