Reporters saying "TARMAC" how stupid!!

Expletives and Swearwords:
The last refuge for those who have run out of brains.

Uh... was there anything in any of my posts that used or suggested
swearwords or explitives? Or do you find this week's sig line offensive?

Jose
--
Money: What you need when you run out of brains.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

. . . is named after its inventer, John L. McAdam . . .

I believe that to be incorrect.
It was invented by Edgar Purnell Hooley in 1901
In 1903 he formed the TarMacadam syndicate, which today is a company
named Tarmac Plc.

For more than you ever wanted to know about Tarmac, go he
http://www.tarmac.co.uk/live/welcome.asp?id=0

I know the history quite well as I was a senior manager with Tarmac
International Ltd., for several years.
Here is an extract from their history, as displayed on their corporate
website.


"It was the start of a new century. The Boer War raged, Queen Victoria's
long reign had just ended and roads across the civilised world were just
feeling the first effects of the new age of the motor car. The search
was on for a material that would create better road surfaces.

As if by chance, on a road near Denby ironworks in Derbyshire in 1901,
the county surveyor of Nottingham - Edgar Purnell Hooley noticed a
barrel of tar had fallen from a dray and burst open.

To avoid a nuisance, someone from the ironworks had thoughtfully covered
the black sticky mess with waste slag from nearby furnaces... and the
world's first tarmacadam surface was born by accident!

Hooley noticed that the patch of road, which had been unintentionally
re-surfaced, was dust-free and hadn't been rutted by traffic. So he set
to work and by the following year, Hooley obtained a British patent for
a method of mixing slag with tar, calling the material Tarmac.

By June 1903, as Orville and Wilbur Wright were preparing to make
mankind's first powered flight, Hooley formed the TarMacadam Syndicate
Limited and business was brisk. Works had been built in Denby,
Derbyshire, and Hooley also began to look to the American market and
took out a US patent in the same year

But the original syndicate hit financial troubles and the Tarmac story
would have ended there but for the financial backing it received from
Wolverhampton Member of Parliament, Sir Alfred Hickman, who owned a
thriving iron works in Ettingshall.

By 1905, Sir Alfred had become chairman, changed the syndicate's name to
Tarmac Limited, moved the company to a site next to his Staffordshire
steelworks and the orders came flooding in.

Sir Alfred was a great benefactor of Wolverhampton, but he died in 1910
and thousands came to watch his funeral procession.

The task of improving Tarmac's fortunes fell on his son Edward, who
reported a profit in his first year to the princely sum of ?4,742. But
expansion was vital and, in 1913 with profits soaring, Tarmac Limited
became a public company. "

--

Tony Roberts
PP-ASEL
VFR OTT
Night
Cessna 172H C-GICE




In article ,
Jose wrote:



It bugs me not. English evolves through usage, and this usage is
reasonable. Tarmac (short for tarmacadam) is actually a trade name
for the substance; it (the word)is formed from "tar" and "macadam".
Macadam (the paving substance made of crushed stone and a binder,
usually tar) is named after its inventer, John L. McAdam, a Scottish
engineer.

Soon, places paved with tarmac started to be called "tarmac", and
since this began to especially be applied to areas around hangars,
those areas themselves were often called "tarmac" irrespective of what
they were paved with. (I don't know why (or even if) tarmac was the
pavement of choice). It's actually a good word - it fills a niche.

Are you equally bugged by people calling the place where planes are
parked "the ramp" when it's not sloped and doesn't connect a higher
place with a lower place (except in the sense of nothing being
perfectly flat)? Or calling clusters of well known thin vertical
hazards "antenna farms" when nothing is grown or harvested there?

Jose

. . . is named after its inventer, John L. McAdam . . .

I believe that to be incorrect.
It was invented by Edgar Purnell Hooley in 1901

The three dots above left out the crucial information. I did not
claim Tarmac was invented by John, just Macadam.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary's etymology, Macadam was
invented by John L. McAdam. It used crushed and graded stones for a
road surface. What Hooley did (according to your quote) was to add
tar to the mix.

Jose
--
Money: What you need when you run out of brains.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

On Fri, 07 Jan 2005 01:13:05 GMT, tony roberts
wrote:

. . . is named after its inventer, John L. McAdam . . .

I believe that to be incorrect.
It was invented by Edgar Purnell Hooley in 1901
In 1903 he formed the TarMacadam syndicate, which today is a company
named Tarmac Plc.

Macadam or MacAdam devised the system of laying down small or crushed
stones to make a weatherproof road.

Tarmacadam improved on this by using tar as a binder, making the world
safe for the bumper-to-bumper traffic we now know and love. (Oh, I
know there's concrete, but that's not much used in the cold climates
like mine.)

Bob,

I keep thinking of the terms in aviation that have evolved. In World
War I Max Immelman performed what we would call a chandelle, creating a
maneuver that was given his name. It was a maximum performance
maneuver for the Fokker Eindecker he flew and was most definitely not a
half loop and half roll, the airplane would not do it and none of those
who observed it described it as such. Looking at books on aerobatics
in the '20s, the Immelman is a steep climbing turn. Sometime in the
'30s it became a half loop and half roll and the original Immelman turn
became the chandelle. Despite the error, we've long since accepted the
misuse of the name and probably couldn't correct it if we tried. The
only problem is that Max is credited with doing a maneuver he could not
have done, nor would he have ever done in combat because of the radical
loss of speed and risk of stalling at the top.

Warmest regards,
Rick

On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 at 09:59:54 in message
, Bob Gardner
wrote:

It bugs me, too. Most ramps are concrete, not tar-macadam, but the newsies
think that saying tarmac makes them sound knowledgeable.

I would have thought it was English 'oldies' like me who might say it in
all innocence. My dictionary is a bit old (1982) but says:

Tarmac. Trade name (often not cap.) a paving material that consists of
crushed stone rolled and bound with a mixture of tar and bitumen. esp.
as used for a road, airport runway, etc. Full Name Tarmacadam.

The Tarmac group is a construction company in the UK.

A Google search found the following:

"John Loudon McAdam (born 1756) designed roads using broken stones laid
in symmetrical, tight patterns and covered with small stones to create a
hard surface. McAdam discovered that the best stone or gravel for road
surfacing had to be broken or crushed, and then graded to a constant
size of chippings. John Loudon McAdam's design, called "macadam roads,"
provided the greatest advancement in road construction at the time.

The water bound Macadam roads were the forerunners of the bitumen-based
binding that was to become tarmacadam. The word tarmacadam was shortened
to the now familiar tarmac. The first tarmac road to be laid was in
Paris in 1854."

So it has a long history!


--
David CL Francis

"David CL Francis" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 at 09:59:54 in message
, Bob Gardner
wrote:

It bugs me, too. Most ramps are concrete, not tar-macadam, but the newsies
think that saying tarmac makes them sound knowledgeable.

I would have thought it was English 'oldies' like me who might say it in
all innocence. My dictionary is a bit old (1982) but says:

Tarmac. Trade name (often not cap.) a paving material that consists of
crushed stone rolled and bound with a mixture of tar and bitumen. esp. as
used for a road, airport runway, etc. Full Name Tarmacadam.

The Tarmac group is a construction company in the UK.


Tarmac is used in the UK as a generic term for any form of asphalt surface
as in a tarmac drive, or a tarmac pavement (sidewalk in your language). Most
or our roads are made of asphalt and in the old days the major company doing
road building was called Tarmac. They had a proprietary brand of road
surfacing material also called Tarmac.

The way it has developed is similar to the way hoover has become synonymous
for vacuum cleaner. Again in the UK, people refer to any vacuum cleaner as a
hoover not just those made by Hoover.

There are many other examples where a trade name or proprietary product has
become to be used generically. The most recent being Viagra which is
attributed to all products of the same formulation, not just the product
from Pfizer.


By the way the company called Tarmac changed its name to Carilion about 10
years ago in a shift away from its association with the black top trade
although it is principally still a civil engineering group

Chris

"Chris" wrote in message news:cri2kh$s47

It bugs me, too. Most ramps are concrete, not tar-macadam, but the
newsies
think that saying tarmac makes them sound knowledgeable.

Anybody ever bothered to correct the newsies? This would be interesting to
most of them.
For example, editors reject terms like "Dumpster" and "Velcro." Meanwhile,
Thermos is so old that it's acceptable to call any such container a thermos,
just as Webster's Dictionary can be published by anybody. It may also be
acceptable to call any paved surface upon which aircraft operate a "tarmac,"
and/or this acceptability in print may vary from country to country.

Probably not worth getting all het up about. If they called the surface
pavement, or ashphalt, they'd likely get a ration of crap from hotheaded
aviators telling them the term is "tarmac." (Also, by way of trivia, cement
is what is used to make concrete. A sidewalk is concrete, not cement, but
that's been misused into pointlessness by the average American just as the
term "nauseous" has.)

Meanwhile, most critics of the media don't know the proper useage of an
apostrophe or comma. And, keep your eye on pilots' misuse of the word
"hanger." (It's "hangar.")

-c

On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 12:44:24 -0500, "Gary Drescher"
wrote:

Dunno, but it's a perfectly good English word (in lower case--it's not an
acronym), so why shouldn't reporters use it?

Tarmac is short for "tar macadam" and refers to the system used for
laying down roads with alternating layers of sand and hot tar. In
these yere parts, it was called "tar vee", as in: "He was out drag
racing all night on the tar vee."

I haven't seen tar macadam put down for many a year, but it used to
make driving hell in the summertime. They usually tarred the road the
day after you brought your new car home.

"Cub Driver" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 12:44:24 -0500, "Gary Drescher"
wrote:

Dunno, but it's a perfectly good English word (in lower case--it's not an
acronym), so why shouldn't reporters use it?

Tarmac is short for "tar macadam" and refers to the system used for
laying down roads with alternating layers of sand and hot tar.

Yup. Further, the Merriam-Webster dictionary distinguishes "Tarmac", a
trademark, from "tarmac", a generic term.

--Gary