Thomas Edison concrete homes

Historical precedent for unconventional construction methods. Used to qualify the additive-concrete demo: "you can do it, but is it actually competitive?" Some Edison concrete homes still exist in New Jersey.

So they don't need a form, but I bet the surface roughness is — you've got to come by and give it a skim coat. It's a horrible thing. There are advantages and disadvantages. If you're going to build one house of a unique design, that concrete process might make sense. Thomas Edison once started to market concrete homes — on my website on materials selection I have pictures of Thomas Edison, and he built some two-story houses out of concrete. He was trying to come up with a cheaper way to build homes. Some of these homes still exist down in New Jersey. So you can do it, and the people who invent that process, they'll go out and find some reporter — Additive Report — and he's going to say, oh look at this great technology. Where's the critical thinking behind that article? It's great for building a one-of-a-kind home. I guess people want one-of-a-kind homes.

Edison's patented one-pour concrete house design (patent ~1,219,000-something), with shingles, filigrees, and porch cast in place. Tom notes one was actually built.

It turns out Thomas Edison started a Portland cement association — this is his patent 1,219,000-something, T.A. Edison on the side — and the drawing is for a continuously poured concrete house. You do one pour, you bring the formwork to the site where you want to build your house, because once you cast it you're not going to move it very easily. He was going to cast in the shingles, all the filigrees, the porch and everything. There's a photo of it, and he did build one. There it is. Can you imagine a neighborhood where everyone has a home the same, but it's not going to rot — it's going to last forever? So that's for one of Maslow's basic needs, which is shelter for humanity.

Edison's patent for casting concrete houses. Used to teach the advantages (fire resistance, thermal mass) and disadvantages (earthquake brittleness, no remodel, uniformity) of structural concrete in residential construction.

Dwellings — first of all, we made dwellings with the materials we had, which were things like grass, and then people went to stone, and now we do wood and metal and concrete. People thought about concrete homes many years ago. Here's a patent assigned to T.A. Edison for a way to cast a concrete home. Here's your concrete mixer and a little conveyor that dumps the concrete in the top of this mold, and you mold a house. Here's a picture of Edison with his concept. Here's a picture of the house. I think this was in Ohio, but he was going to mass-produce these. Talk about a housing development where everyone's home looks the same.