Macadamize

   , TARMAC

   What pleasure would you get from a sleek, fast automobile if the road you were driving on was filled with ruts and puddles of water? You couldn't make much time, and what time you did make would be uncomfortable. The man who saved us from these conditions never saw an automobile because none had been invented during his lifetime. John Loudon McAdam (1756-1836), whose name has a variant spelling of Macadam, was born in Ayr, Scotland, but his care, on the death of his father in 1770, was entrusted to a merchant uncle in New York. McAdam was put to work in his uncle's counting house, and by the time he was twentyseven, he had acquired a tidy fortune.

   When McAdam returned to his native Scotland, he was appalled by the condition of the roads, which were of rubble granite. The lives of horses that trod on them were shortened, and, after a heavy rain, the roads became a morass and were all but impassable.

   McAdam conducted road-making experiments at Falmouth and Bristol and conceived the idea of a roadbed consisting of layers of broken stones of nearly uniform size. Placed over a convex roadbed which allowed water to drain off, the stones would then be crushed into position by traffic. Roads so built were said to be macadamized. McAdam's roads were a boon to transportation. He was appointed general surveyor in 1827 for all English highways.

   A bituminous binder for roads is called tarmac. Airfields have also been called tarmacs ("There are two planes on the tarmac"). One can find McAdam's name in tarmac, a shortening of tarmacadam. But MacAdam never had the pleasure of seeing his name (or a part of it) used with tarmac. It was sixty years after his death, in 1903, that the Wright brothers made their famous flight.

   Automobiles jar the stones loose on a macadam road. A more compact surface, such as asphalt, has generally replaced macadam.