Via Jak King this article from Atlas Obscura tells the interesting story about Thomas Edison and the development of concrete houses. While Edison invented a whole bunch of things including the lightbulb and the phonograph, you may not know that he founded the Portland Cement Company in 1899 and patented the construction of houses using one single concrete pour.
He was way ahead of his time thinking of preforming the interior. “The invention was patented in 1917, with the following introduction: “The object of my invention is to construct a building of a cement mixture by a single molding operation, all its parts, including the sides, roofs, partitions, bath tubs, floors, etc., being formed of an integral mass of a cement mixture.”
The whole point was to provide affordable fireproof housing, and Edison donated his patented design to qualified builders to create new residential districts with concrete housing.
In theory, this would result in a whole new kind of home with various benefits: fireproof, insect-proof, easy to clean, and at a very affordable $1,200 per house. Edison saw this as a potential solution for cities with housing shortages, allowing people to move from slums to cheap new residential areas of poured concrete houses. To help with this, he chose to donate the patented information, completely free of charge, to qualified builders.
Of course there were issues. A builder needed to purchase $175,000 of specialized equipment to build a house, and the molds for the houses had 2,300 pieces. Surprisingly some concrete houses were built in New Jersey. Row houses and single family houses were built for U.S. Steel employees in Gary Indiana, with over 70 of the original 86 built still standing. While concrete housing did not take off as a trend, Edison was a century ahead of the same innovations now being experimented with in 3D printed housing.
Edison also wanted to create utilitarian objects out of concrete to make items, like pianos, affordable to everyone. This YouTube video below features making a piano encased in concrete as per Edison’s ideas, with surprising favourable results as a musical instrument.
Well with some modifications, I’m sure his plans are still good. Builders are just to cheap to spend the cash because they still want the 1000% profit.