19c cement recipes (Anthony Nesbit 1830).
Cement. A good cement for uniting bricks together, for carving, scrolls, capitals, etc, may be made of resin, beeswax, brickdust and chalk boiled together. The bricks must be rubbed even; then heated, and rubbed together, with the cement between them. A strong and useful cement for joining marble, and all other hard stones, may be made as follows; melt two pounds of beeswax, and one pound of resin together; then add one pound and a half of the same kind of matter, burnt and well pulverized, as the body to be cemented is composed of; let the whole mass be kneaded with water, and applied warm, to the parts of the body to be cemented, which must also be heated.
An exceedingly strong cement that will become as hard as stone, and last for ages, may be made in the following manner; take lime, well slaked, and sand in equal proportions; and temper them in linseed oil to the consistency of mortar; then beat it well in a trough or upon a floor, and it will be fit for use.
When an old stone or brick wall is to be covered in this cement or plaster, let the face be chipped a little with a bricklayers hammer, or a mallet and chisel; then drench it with linseed oil and white lead, until it will drink no more.
Dr Higgins had a patent in 1779, now expired, for his invention of a water cement, or stucco, as follows; fifty-six pounds of pure coarse sand, fourty-two pounds of pure fine sand, mix them together, and moisten them thoroughly with lime-water; to the wetted sand add fourteen pounds of pure fresh burnt lime, and while beating them up together, fourteen pounds of bone-ash; the quicker and more perfectly these materials are beaten together, the sooner used, the better will the cement be. Fine sand alone, or coarse sand alone, will do for some works; but the finer the sand the more lime must be used.
Cankers of a forge well beaten with lime and sand, make a good cement for furnaces.
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cement making
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Anyone that has mixed concrete, lime and cement mortars by hand all day and every day will know what a laborious and back-breaking job it is. The 1920s saw cheaper, mass produced building materials such as concrete blocks and mass produced bricks, these materials although still mortared with a lime mix was giving way to the simple sand and cement mix mortar, much easier to mix and use than lime mortars, especially as the concrete mixer was becoming easily available and relatively cheap to buy during the 1930s.
The concrete mixer must have seemed as much a breakthrough in design to the building industry as the threshing machine was to the farming industry as far as ease, speed and cost is concerned. The pictures of mixers shown below demonstrates the breakthrough of automation within the building industry.
