Moment at 0:00 in He watched labourers fail to scrape cement off a tool, and built a house out of it by Awesome Architecture.
By the 1870s incombustible materials were easy to get, but builders kept using wood for the parts of a house you can see. William E. Ward wanted one that could not burn. Iron was no answer. In his own words, experience had long ago proved that unprotected iron, associated with combustible materials, is altogether unreliable when exposed to a severe fire-test. Stone was no answer either — the walls stop burning but the spans do not, and whatever is laid across a room is still wood or bare iron. The idea came from a quay in England in 1867, where he watched labourers trying to scrape hardened cement off their tools. The adhesion was so firm that the break came through the cement rather than at the iron. He ran his own experiments in 1871-72 and then built the house.
Saved by Financial Freedom Corner.