The story of asphalt begins thousands of years ago. Asphalt occurs naturally in both asphalt lakes and in rock asphalt (a mixture of sand, limestone and asphalt).
The ancient Mesopotamians used it to waterproof temple baths and water tanks.
The Phoenicians caulked the seams of their merchant ships with asphalt. In the days of the Pharaohs, Egyptians used the material as mortar for rocks laid along the banks of the Nile to prevent erosion, and the infant Moses' basket was waterproofed with asphalt.
625 BC
The first recorded use of asphalt as a road-building material in Babylon. The ancient Greeks were also familiar with asphalt. The Romans used it to seal their baths, reservoirs and aqueducts.
1595
Europeans exploring the New World discovered natural deposits of asphalt. Sir Walter Raleigh described a "plain" (or lake) of asphalt on the island of Trinidad, near Venezuela. He used it for re-caulking his ships.
Early 1800s
Thomas Telford built more than 900 miles of roads in Scotland, perfecting the method of building roads with broken stones. His contemporary, John Loudon McAdam, used broken stone joined to form a hard surface to build a Scottish turnpike. Later, to reduce dust and maintenance, builders used hot tar to bond the broken stones together, producing "tarmacadam" pavements
1870
Professor Edward J. de Smedt invented modern road asphalt in 1870 at Columbia University in New York City after emigrating from Belgium. He patented it (U.S. Nos. 103,581; -2) and called it "sheet asphalt pavement" but it became known as French asphalt pavement. A natural rock known as asphalt had been used to construct buildings for many years. In 1824 large blocks of natural asphalt rock were placed on the wide boulevard in Paris known as the Champs-Élysées. This was the first time this type of rock was used for a road.
On 29 July 1870, the first sheet of Edward de Smedt's asphalt pavement was laid on William Street in Newark, New Jersey. He then engineered a modern, "well-graded," maximum-density road asphalt. The first uses of this road asphalt were in Battery Park and on Fifth Avenue in New York City in 1872. Five years later 54,000 square yards of sheet asphalt from Trinidad Lake were used on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C.
Today almost all the roads in developed countries are surfaced with De Smedt's man-made asphalt. Asphalt comes from the processing of crude oils. The word asphalt comes from the Greek "asphaltos," meaning "secure". Everything that is valuable in crude oil is first removed and put to good use. Then what remains (hydrogen and carbon compounds with minor amounts of nitrogen, sulfur, and oxygen) is made into asphalt cement for pavement.
1900
Frederick J. Warren filed a patent for "Bitulithic" pavement, a mixture of bitumen and aggregate
("bitu" from "bitumen" and "lithic" from "lithos," the Greek word for rock).
The first modern asphalt facility was built in 1901 by Warren Brothers in East Cambridge, Mass.
1907
Production of refined petroleum asphalt outstripped the use of natural asphalt. As automobiles grew in popularity, the demand for more and better roads led to innovations in both producing and laying asphalt. Steps toward mechanization included drum mixers and portland cement concrete mechanical spreaders for the first machine-laid asphalt.
1942
During World War II, asphalt technology greatly improved, spurred by the need of military aircraft for surfaces that could stand up to heavier loads.
1970s
The international energy crisis underscored the need for conservation of natural resources. Since that time, an increasing amount of recycled asphalt has been incorporated in mixes. Today, asphalt pavement is the world's most recycled material with more than 100 million metric tons of asphalt paving material is recycled each year.