The Morning Astorian

NAMES COMMISSION
To the International Road Congress at Paris
TO BE HELD OCTOBER 11
United States Will be Strongly and Officially Represented Says President Roosevelt, Logan, Waller, Page Director With Excellent Staff

WASHINGTON, June 13.-President Roosevelt has directed that this Nation be strongly and officially represented at the International Road Congress to be held at Paris the week beginning October 11, and credentials have been issued naming Logan Waller Page, Director of the Office of Public Roads of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, Chairman of the Commission. The other members named are Colonel Charles S. Bromwell of the United States Corps of Engineers, now serving as Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds of the District of Columbia, and Clifford Richardson of New York, an eminent chemist and one of the world's acknowledged authorities on bituminous road building materials.

This coming Congress, which will be attended by distinguished delegates from every country in the world, is regarded by highway engineers and experts as probably the most important ever summoned for the discussion of an economic question. Its need is the direct outgrowth of the advent of the automobile, for while thousands are ignorant of the fact, the soft tires of the modern motor-car are the greatest menace the hard surface thoroughfares of the world have ever been called upon to face. To understand how a pneumatic tire made of rubber could possibly injure a road surfaced with particles of crushed rock, one must have at least a faint understanding of the theories on which first Tressaguet of Limoges and then MacAdam of Ayr built that class of highway. They figured that a road composed of crushed stone would not only endure the constant traffic of iron-tired vehicles but that the metal-bound wheels would be constantly crushing the stones and forming rock dust. That dust would, they argued, not merely sift itself into all cracks and interstices, but would fill all surface inequalities and when wet would be rolled into a smooth, impervious, water-shedding, shell-like surface.

They reasoned well, built wisely, and for over a century and a quarter the so-called macadam road did everything that the famous French and Scotch highway engineers claimed it capable of. It came to be the ideal road for suburban sections, and thousands of miles were built. France to date has spent $660,000,000 on her incomparable system of rock surfaced National routes and the United States has followed to a degree, possessing at the present time approximately
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