As a youngster. A sad story within my family. It was during the late 40s or early 50s if I recall, my great-uncle discovered a breakthrough method to cure road asphalt. Normally crews would hold back traffic for hours and days while newly laid asphalt hardened. He found that fitting water sprinklers on paving machines would dramatically accelerate curing. Evaporation cools and other reactions. Simple and important. Cost savings. Time savings. Better hardening. Demand for his services skyrocketed as he was heralded in the news and booked for consulting. One pre-dawn morning while driving to a meetup in Minnesota, his car careened off a curve and into a rural general store. Families never forget such sorrow, nor pride.
I remembered that because:
Iowa State University’s Christopher Williams was just trying to see if adding bio-oil to asphalt would improve the hot- and cold-weather performance of pavements. What he found was a possible green replacement for asphalt derived from petroleum.
Created by a thermochemical process called fast pyrolysis, Bioasphalt can be mixed and paved at lower temperatures than conventional asphalt.
bioasphalt wiki