Was cement invented by the good guys or the bad guys?
Good guys (great guys actually)
Cement does not normally occur in nature, so you could reasonably say the technique of artificially combining inert sand with a binder like quicklime is an invention. It was invented by the ancient Mesopotamians in the 3rd millenium BC. It's a tough call to say from this distance whether they were mostly good or bad guys, but if you read up on them and it turns out they kept slaves or practiced human sacrifice then I'd reckon they were bad by our standards.
Concrete is a material used in building construction, consisting of a hard, chemically inert particulate substance, known as an aggregate (usually made from different types of sand and gravel), that is bonded together by cement and water. The Assyrians and Babylonians used clay as the bonding substance or cement. The Egyptians used lime and gypsum cement. In 1756, British engineer, John Smeaton made the first modern concrete (hydraulic cement) by adding pebbles as a coarse aggregate and mixing powered brick into the cement. In 1824, English inventor, Joseph Aspdin invented Portland Cement, which has remained the dominant cement used in concrete production.
