50 Things That Made The Modern Economy With Tim Harford

I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.

That's supposed to have been the boast of Caesar Augustus, the first Roman Emperor, just

over 2,000 years ago. If it was, he was exaggerating. Ancient Rome is a city of brick,

no less glorious for that.

Augustus was also joining a long tradition of denigrating or overlooking one of the most

ancient and versatile of building materials. The great Roman architectural writer, Vitruvius,

mentions them only in passing.

Denis Diderot is great French encyclopedia of the sciences, arts and crafts published in

1751 and an inspiration for Adam Smith's famous description of the pin factory. Well,

Diderot doesn't trouble himself to include any images of brick making at all.

That's because a brick is such an intuitive thing. People have been teaching themselves

to build simple structures out of brick for many thousands of years and grand ones too.

The hanging gardens of Babylon were made of brick, so was the biblical tower of Babel.

Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly.

That's Genesis 11, verse 3. They used brick instead of stone.

By verse 5, the Lord is on the scene and things aren't looking too good for the brick loving

citizens of Babel.

As James Campbell and Will Price point out in their magisterial history of bricks, the

humble cuboid is everywhere. The biggest man-made structure on the planet, the Ming Dynasty

Great Wall of China, is largely constructed of brick. The astonishing temples of Bagan

in Myanmar, the Taj Mahal in India, mighty Malborg castle in Poland, Siena's Palazzo

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