Joseph Davidovits Quotes

The ancient Egyptians are well known for using minerals such as chrysocolla and to produce enamels... They had a word for such products, ari-kat, meaning man-made or synthetic. ...[T]he highest spiritual influence was attributed to stone. ... and other red stones represented the blood of ...Lapis lazuli was associated with daybreak. Chrysocolla was associated with ...the "First Time" event of Creation. ...[M]inerals and rocks had divine properties in a world where all of nature was revered.

When the Egyptian alchemists developed glassmaking during the New Kingdom, it was to carry on the old religious tradition of making synthetic stones.

[P]lants were supplying a lot of chemicals during antiquity and even during our Middle Ages in Europe. ...If we look... at the results of the burning of wood or plants, ...we get plenty of SiO₂... plenty of CaO () in beech, oak, acacia, palm trees. Plenty of alkali (K₂O) in fern and bulrush... which means I am claiming... [the Egyptians] used the plants and the woods in the manufacture of these ashes... the sources of their chemicals.

[L]ime is very important and it has been shown by [(1990) Professor D.D.] Klemm: "...in the VI. Dynasty lime disappears nearly within the mortars. May this be interpreted as a variation in the accessibility of fuel [of wood] and consequently of economic potential and crisis?" ...He was talking about the regular lime that is calcined from limestone in a kiln. ...[W]e have not found any remains of kilns... to manufacture the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren. We need... 150,000 tons of lime, which means that we should have found remains of kilns. We did not... which means that the technology was different. ...[I]t was the one of ashes that contains lime... The ecological disaster came from the over-exploitation of wood... proven by the fact that just after the Great Pyramids, one gets frescoes... describing famines...

[W]e observe a dramatical stop of the technology. ...[T]he variation of the pyramids' volume with time... from the invention by Djoser to the Cheops pyramid, that is ...within 60 years, we have an increase in the volumes ...optimum by Cheops and Chephren, and then a dramatic plunge... of the volume ...by Mykerinos, and the others are ridiculously small. What happened?

[I]t is very difficult to translate a technical text... if you are not aware of the signification of the keywords. ...[I]magine that I got a text from Egypt that has been translated... [as] "make fluid stone with ashes insect in glass water"... what we have in reality is the description of, to make cement with fly ashes and water glass.

So we started with mud bricks that were used in the enclosures during the 2nd Dynasty. They did not have stone [working, hard metal] tools so... they used mud bricks. Then... the invention of the first limestone bricks by agglomeration. The technology improved into bigger and bigger... limestone blocks, and then suddenly, 800 years later, they had tools to cut the stone. No! They returned to pyramids made of mud brick. So this is something is not capable of explaining. It is something that ic technology is capable of explaining, essentially because here we had a stop of the use of this technology to make stone.

In my pursuit to develop new inorganic polymer materials, I was struck by the fact that the same simple hydrothermal conditions governed the synthesis of some organic plastics in alkali medium, as well as s and s. Thus and polycondense into... ... On the other hand, the reacts with NaOH at 100-150°C and polycondenses into hydrated ... or hydroxysodalite... I proceeded... to develop amorphous to semi-crystalline three-dimensional silico-aluminate [-Si-O-Al-O-] materials, which I call... s (mineral polymers resulting from or geosynthesis).

[I]n the... early stage of polymer chemistry the question was raised on the ability of Si to generate chains... analogous to the s. ... (1912) isolated the compound SiH₄, the chemical structure ...equivalent of (CH₄). ...F. S. Kipping published his results on the preparation of the ... group (also called siloxo) Si-O-Si ...from the condensation of two groups and formation of water ...The ...reaction yielded ...organic mineral polymers known as s. ...Very soon after this ...it became evident that the silicone bridge -Si-O-Si- had something in common with the ...structure of (Almeningen et. al., 1963).

Khusi-to build in reagglomerated stone, and this is what we get as sentence in the Famine Stele: "with these products (that are depicted in the... columns in hieroglyphs) they have built the pyramid (the royal tomb)." Which pyramid? It is the first... of ... built by ... It is the first pyramid, the step pyramid at ... made of small limestone bricks... manufactured like crude clay bricks. They took the molds, made the bricks, transported them, and laid down the pyramid. ...[T]hey used the same technology ...previously... in the monuments and... the enclosure of , the pharaoh just before... Djoser.

[F]or god in the creation, he carves mankind and the other gods in his body, the mountain. The creation is the divine incarnation in carved stone.

In antique text what is very difficult to translate are verbs. ...[T]he verb iri-kat... means to create, to manufacture. This is the verb that is used to depict the god Khnum when he is making, when he is creating, manufacturing the ka, that is the soul of the pharaoh in eternal stone.

Advanced technology plays no part in the production of s. ...An individual of the could produce geopolymers... [with] the knowledge that comes from intelligent, repeated observation and experimentation with substances found...

In... 1983, with Joseph Sawyer as head of Lone Star's research laboratory... I started to develop early high-strength geopolymeric binders and cements based on based on both geopolymeric and hydraulic cement chemistries. Within one month Lone Star Industries Inc. formed the development company, PYRAMENT... exclusively dedicated to... this new class of cement. ...It was discovered that the addition of ground blast furnace slag, which is a latent hydraulic cementitious product, to the poly(sialate) type of geopolymer, accelerates the setting time and... improves compressive and flexural strength. The first Davidovits and Sawyer patent was filed in... 1984... The corresponding European patent... in 1985... and these... disclose our preliminary finding...of 1983. Geopolymer cements are acid-resistant cementitious materials with zeolitic properties that can be applied to long-term containment of hazardous and toxic wastes.

In 1975-1976, when I first presented the concept of mineral polymer, scientists who could not imagine that polymers existed outside... of organic polymers very often fustigated my research and new terminology.