ShmoopTube

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For the next several centuries nobody could beat the Romans in [Man driving a steamroller]

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road-building but through it all they retained their incredible sense of

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modesty which is why they only built 10 billion statues commemorating their [A room filled with old Roman statues]

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greatest achievements up to and including really good bowel movement one time

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after Rome there were plenty of improvements to wheeled vehicles and [Wheel moves onto a road]

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wheels themselves but not so much for the road it wasn't until the 18th

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century that road building would make its next big leap [Roman man leaps across the road]

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but what eventually caused the jump forward the one reason is that River and

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canal transport was doing fine for a long time but started to reach its limit [A yacht in a dock]

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which makes sense it is after all you know just a canal what could they do to

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make it better add a dolphin show at night might be distracting.. Anyway another

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problem was that populations were growing many were moving farther away [Women holding their babies]

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from convenient water transport maybe it was for farmland or maybe the dolphin

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shows were getting to be too much to handle whatever the case there's no

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denying that the 1700s saw some crazy road action and yeah there were some bad [1700's people walking down a street]

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ideas the two-story outhouse was one of them there were so-called corduroy roads

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made of logs laid down in a long line which probably rattled everyone's brains [Car driving down a corduroy road]

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out then there were roads made of wooden blocks that were supposed to be

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miraculously quiet and apparently the sound of horse hoofs hitting stone roads [Horse galloping down a wooden road]

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drove people crazy after a while but how long could it possibly have taken for

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those roads to rot. Now then there were classic cobblestone roads which were

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just big round rocks mortared together cobblestones offered the triple whammy [Cobblestone road with the Dubliner pub]

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of being loud slippery in the rain and really hard on wooden wheels so claims [Horse pulling a carriage down cobblestone road]

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but essentially garbage the hero of the roads turned out to be a Scot named John

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MacAdam well around 1820 he tested a new road building strategy instead of

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digging deep trenches and building massive rocks foundation he dug a shallow [John MacAdam digging]

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flat area and filled it with gravel he made sure the road was slightly [Road filling up with rain]

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higher in the middle then on the edges why well so the water would run off he

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also used larger gravel on the bottom and smaller gravel on the surface and [John MacAdam building a road from gravel]

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like many humble inventors before him he named the process Macadomization

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smooth dude well Macadamization is still the basic process of road building

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today although we had lots of petroleum products and some heavier machinery [Heavy vehicle drives by]

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cheap roads made overland transportation way more popular in the US than elsewhere

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pretty soon public roads and wagons were rivaling the canals and dolphin shows [Dolphin jumping up in a canal]

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were relegated to SeaWorld okay fine it was never a dolphin show in the

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canal please don't write that in an essay and blame us we can't handle being

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sued yet again for a bad essay thing [Boy angry at receiving a bad essay grade]

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