Tile Roofing is OLD, how old? about as old as pottery, if you don’t know how old that is…set aside a few hours of your day and ask an archaeologist, trust me on the few hours thing…ask them that question and you’ll be there a while. so yes, tile roofing is very, very, very old. there have been shards of glazed clay roofing tiles discovered in both china and greece dating back over 5,000 years.
Much like with everything else, the romans copied the greek roofing tiles, but made it just slightly different you know, kinda like how jupiter totally isn’t a knock off of zeus, and venus is completely original just ignore that statue of aphrodite in the corner there. by adapting the greek tile roof the romans then introduced tile roofing to everywhere they also introduced paying taxes to rome to, which at the time was just about the whole known world in the west.
Tile roofing just kinda kept keeping on doing it’s thing, being handcrafted and expensive and a great way to earn a living if you didn’t mind mud and fire so much until the early 1920s when the first practical power driven tile making machine was developed in denmark. This machine, called the Ringsted (although tiles are nothing like rings, but whatever) passed a line of molds under a hopper that poured concrete into the molds, genius, now if only someone had figured out how to run that off waterwheel power in like the 1200s life would probably have been a bit easier for them (had they not been burned for witchcraft for doing so).
About 5 years later an english tile company bought one of the ringsted’s and quickly improved on it. and thus began the work of rapidly improving on tile manufacturing equipment. by 1961 over 80% of all domestic roofs in great britain used concrete tile, with austrailia at 60%ish and germany around 30%. Recently though concrete tile roofing now dominates european roofs and the south pacific basin with an estimated 90% of all roofs being comprised of concrete tile.
across the pond in america clay roofing tiles have been recovered from the 1585 roanoke island settlement in north carolina. Typically clay tile was used in the english settlements in jamestown virginia and st. augustine florida. and all over the place in new orleans.
the popularity of clay tiles in colonial america was largely due to preventing fires, it was either slate roofing or tile roofing and with it being a couple hundred years before the start of slate roofing production in vermont you either had a tile roof or you spent buckets of money importing slate roofing materials from wales.with the start of slate roofing production in vermont and copper roofing gaining popularity across the us there was a rapid decline in the amount of homes in the united states wearing clay hats.
It is still difficult to tell exactly how old tile roofing is largely because it can be hard to determine if that ancient shard of clay was a roof, a road or an oven, and to make matters worse clay roofing tile was often reused by people who realized it was cheaper to grab the roof off the nearby ruins than get a new one made.
