The NIST stone test wall is an experiment by the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology to determine how different types of construction stone weather. It includes 2352 samples of stone from 47 different states within the US and 16 different countries. The wall measures approximately 12 m long, 4 m high, 0.6 m thick at the bottom, and 0.3 m at the top.
It includes varieties of andesite, argillite (slate), basalt, bluestone, breccia, conglomerate, coquina, coral, dacite, diabase, diorite, dolomite, gabbro, gneiss, granite, granodiorite, greenstone, labradorite, limestone, marble, melaphyre, pitchstone, pumice, pyrophyllite, quartz, quartzite, sandstone, schist, serpentinite, shellstone, soapstone, syenite, travertine, and tuff.
The wall was built by one stonemason, Vincent Di Benedeto, in 1948. He used two types of stone-setting mortar on the front. He used both a 1:3 lime mortar, with a high calcium hydrate and a 1:0.4:3 portland cement, whiting, and sand mortar.
The wall was moved from its original location in Washington, D.C. to Gaithersburg, Maryland in May 1977.
Famous quotes containing the words stone, test and/or wall:
“It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one, a savage city, yet it had such tenderness, a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone and steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and of machinery; and yet it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed, as full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it was full of hate.”
—Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938)
“We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“When all this is over, you know what I’m going to do? I’m gonna get married, gonna have about six kids. I’ll line ‘em up against the wall and tell them what it was like here in Burma. If they don’t cry, I’ll beat the hell out of ‘em.”
—Samuel Fuller, U.S. screenwriter, and Milton Sperling. Samuel Fuller. Barney, Merrill’s Marauders (1962)