ABSTRACT
Robert Herman Bogue exercised a remarkably far-sighted leadership that made the PCA Fellowship a major contributor to what would be described as the materials science of concrete. Among Bogue's personal contributions was a landmark paper, Calculation of Compounds in Portland Cement, published in 1929. To understand the significance of the paper, it is necessary to know a little about portland cement and its manufacture. Until the publication of Bogue's paper, there was much controversy about the compositions of the compounds present in the clinker, even though the elemental compositions of clinker and cement were determined routinely in cement plants and other laboratories. Bogue knew that portland cement clinker usually contained four main compounds, namely, alite, belite, celite and felite, of unknown composition. Ability to calculate compositions of cements in terms of the amounts of the main compounds present provided a valuable new tool for explaining, or predicting, differences in engineering performance among portland cements.
