John Loudon Macadam

                                           John Loudon Macadam

John Loudon Macadam(1756-1836) achieved fame as a civil engineer and road builder through his development of the new process called ‘macadamisation’.  Born in Ayr in 1756 Macadam developed this process through a series of road experiments which resulted in him building his newly designed roads with a smooth hard surface. In addition to this his new roads were to be physically raised above the nearby parallel ground and surfaced with larger then smaller rocks until the entire surface was held together by fine gravel or slag. This process made the new roads less boggy and long lasting than the existing roads of the time. Macadam wrote a number of works to publicize his new theories on road building including the ‘Practical essay on the Scientific Repair and Preservation of Roads’. His ideas were quickly adopted and put in to practice and by the time of his death in 1836 they had been implemented in many other countries.  Subsequent to Macadam further improvements were made to his system of road building in particular the use of tar to help bind the road further. This became known as tarmac from ‘Tar Macadam’.