One of my habits at work is to read a book during my lunch break. Earlier in the year I managed to finish Darwin's 'The origin of species,' which was a fascinating book, full of first hand experience of breeding pigeons and of the sex lives of the Cirripedia (barnacles to you and I). He was a great thinker, but all the way through the book, I kept saying to myself, 'Ah, if only you had known about plate tectonics,' and 'Ah, the wonders that would be revealed to you if you had known about DNA.' He was certainly ahead of his time, but Darwin was no writer: his circumlocutions and plumpness of prose make reading 'The Origins' a fairly arduous undertaking.
In the summer I read 'Matterhorn' by Karl Marlentes: not a book about climbing, but about a platoon of Marines in Vietnam. As one reviewer, Sebastian Junger, said, 'It's not a book so much as a deployment, and you will not return unaltered.' Strongly recommended.
I'm currently working my way through Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations,' which is a much easier read. Although Smith seems also to have been paid by the word, he salts some real golden nuggets through his work: 'People of the same trade seldom meet together but [that] the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick [sic], or in some contrivance to raise prices,' and 'All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.' What was true in business and economics in 1776 is still so true today.
The reason that I mention these substantial books is because I have another substantial book on my desk: 'Innovations in Portland cement manufacturing,' volumes I and II - all 1694 page of it (772 pages in volume 1, covering history, materials and fuels, pyroprocessing and kiln operation, finish milling and material handling, and process additions, and 919 pages in volume 2, covering optimisation and control, environment and energy, health and safety, and analytical techniques).
The book, edited by Bhatty, Miller, Kosmatka and Bohan, is an updated edition of the single-volume 2004 publication, now split into two hardback limited edition volumes to allow in more material and to keep it physically readable, even though each 'half' is still weighty.
The first chapter, 'Cement Manufacturing - A Historical Perspective' by Waldemar A. Klemm, may give you an idea of the thoroughness of the book. Firstly, the author heads back further than most accounts, correctly pointing out that a form of concrete (incorporating sand, rock fragments and a cementitious binder) was used in what is now Israel around 7000BCE, and in the floors of huts in Serbia from around 5600BCE. (The use in the book of BCE as a year denominator surprised me - look up 'before common era' on Google to find out more). The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all later developed their own versions of cement, largely based on lime. No great advances in cement chemistry (or improvement in performance) were made before the mid-1700s.
John Smeaton was among the first to make a systematic investigation into the best raw materials to use for cement, in his project to rebuild the Edystone lighthouse, and this seems to have been the catalyst for a century or more of innovation, starting with James Parker's patent for 'Parker's Cement,' also known as 'Roman Cement.' Louis Vicat of France made strides in understanding the chemistry of cement, while the British continued to file patents, including one for 'British Cement,' by James Frost and another (No. 5022 in 1824) for Joseph Aspdin, for 'An improvement in the modes of producing artificial stone,' which he latterly named 'Portland cement' after the renowned stone used in the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666. Klemm makes plain that his son William Aspdin - long held up as a sort of patron saint of cement - was a sharp operator, beset by bankruptcies and espionage, allegations of unprofessional conduct and dubious financial activities. He eventually abandoned his costly mansion in Gravesend, Kent, known as 'Portland Hall,' and moved with his family to Germany, where he built a cement plant with another English expatriate, at Lägerdorf. This, also, was not a great success, and Aspdin shortly died 'in consequence of an unfortunate fall' - and perhaps the effects of strong spirits.
By the 1870s Germany had mastered cement production but, using the newly-invented rotary kiln and a need to build a continent from scratch, the US quickly became the pre-eminent cement-making nation. As Klemm concludes, 'The clues to where we are going may be found in where we have been.'
The rest of the book is similarly encyclopaedic, with in-depth and up-to-date information on all areas of cement manufacture. One minor point is that there is only scant mention of alternatives to OPC, next-to-nothing on CO2 and climate change and little on future trends in cement manufacture. However, 'Innovations in Portland cement manufacture' is a reference book that will be of use in every plant in the global cement industry.