Read through CC's extensive archives to see how the industry has changed, and how it's remained the same.
For our 50th anniversary, Concrete Construction takes a look back to our own beginnings by pulling some of our favorite products of yesteryear from our archives.
Around 1960, the industry began investigating the use of synthetic fibers to improve the performance of concrete.
Sharing the Golden Anniversary spotlight this year is the Nox-Crete Products Group, which changed concrete forming in 1956 by offering the first chemically active concrete form-release agent.
Lightweight insulating concrete “was produced with a proprietary preformed foam system which makes it possible to produce cellular concrete of the required weight and strength for each specific job.”
Around 1960, the industry began investigating the use of synthetic fibers to improve the performance of concrete.
Ideally, joints should be sawed in concrete slabs before drying or cooling causes random cracking.
With the placement of a 72-foot-diameter plastic sheet between two concrete slabs, “something new has been achieved in the field of water-barrier construction,” heralded a March 1961 news item.
Around 1960, the industry began investigating the use of synthetic fibers to improve the performance of concrete.
The March 1963 issue reported on tilt-down, a new construction technique from Plus-Crete International, said to provide cost savings of 10 percent compared with the tilt-up method.
Developed a decade before Concrete Construction was established, Symons Steel-Ply forms appeared among the product listings in the first issue.
Lightweight insulating concrete “was produced with a proprietary preformed foam system which makes it possible to produce cellular concrete of the required weight and strength for each specific job.”
The February 1982 product listings offered a new device from Koehring Compaction, configured a little differently from subsequent models.
The rotating laser appeared in the early 1970s, and in a September 1978 article Concrete Construction declared that lasers were “no longer a solution looking for a problem” but rather “the most significant advancement in construction measurement history."
The September 1956 issue also presented a process, still in the developmental stage, of imparting a decorative pattern to the finished surface of concrete.
Pumping concrete became more commonplace with the development in the late 1950s of pumps with small diameter, flexible lines.
Thanks to the powder lance, missile makers and others wishing to install temporary concrete structures no longer need fear a costly removal job later.
They're “not quite miraculous,” but this family of materials “has almost breath-taking possibilities in the concrete construction field,” enthused a January 1958 article.
Concrete Construction started covering decorative concrete techniques in the inaugural September 1956 issue with an item on this lightweight aluminum platform stamping tool.
Ten years before Dustin Hoffman's character in “The Graduate” was advised to pursue a career in plastics, Concrete Construction reported on “a new family of man-made materials called polyethylene films ... a member of that exceedingly confusing family of materials called plastics.”
The model HH Pay-loader tractor shovel was the first piece of equipment of its type ever to receive an Industrial Design Institute Award, according to a product listing in the January 1957 issue.