Chairman, lady and gentlemen concrete and cement are probably amongst the least fascinating topics

you could ever have a speech about. nevertheless they are quite important because they are what we
make most of our buildings out of. we've been making buildings out of concrete for hundreds and
thousands of years. the ancient Egyptians probably invented concrete and they suddenly used quite a
lot of it. the Romans were big users of concrete and the interesting thing is that the basic technology
hasn't changed much since Roman times. it still depends on using cement and different types of other
materials: sand, pebbles and so on and mixing them together in the right proportions. and then you can
do pretty much whatever you want with concrete. the Romans built wonderful monuments aqueductsm
bridges. Roman roads they were all built out of concrete. the Romans used to add different types of
things to concrete according to what they wanted the concrete to do there. for instance found ways of
making concrete sets under water for building the piers and pillars of bridges for instance. and as I said
every type of concrete had its own specific types of additives which could be put in in different
proportions. one thing that puzzled archaeologists quite a lot for awhile was the Roman custom of
adding blood and horsehair to a lot of their concrete and people thought that this was some kind of
superstitious claptrap, some kind of ritual sacrifice to purify the building or to bring luck actually turns
out it had nothing to do with that. the Romans added horsehair because horsehair is the fiber it tends to
be quite tough considering how thin it is and it serves to bind the concrete together. in fact we do
something very similar nowadays. we put in carbon fibers in our concrete to prevent the concrete from
cracking when it hardens. you may sometimes notice that walls develop little cracks and it just passed
the natural way of concrete when it dries and expands and contracts and of course if there's a crack it
can weaken the structure of the building and the rooms had just found out that these fibers prevented
that from happening or slowed it down same thing with blood blood because of its chemical properties
absorbs oxygen and air. in general so it prevents air bubbles from building up in concrete. having air
bubbles is quite dangerous because the air bubbles allow spaces for water to seep into the concrete
when it rains and the water can then cause damaged the walls and again weaken the building so the
Romans had found out a clever solution to a problem which we still face nowadays except that
nowadays as I say we use different types of carbon fiber instead of horsehair. and we use special
chemicals instead of blood but the basic approach is the same and so far from being boring I'd say
concrete is really rather fascinating thank you