Edgar Purnell Hooley

Edgar Purnell Hooley (5 June 1860 – 26 January 1942) was an English inventor. After inventing tarmac in 1902, he founded Tar Macadam Syndicate Ltd the following year and registered tarmac as a trademark. Following a merger in 2013 the business became Tarmac Limited, one of the United Kingdom's largest building materials companies.

Born in Swansea, Hooley was articled as a civil engineer to the firm of James Craik in Bristol.

Hooley entered a business partnership with Francis Lean, as Architects and Surveyors at Neath, then in the county of Glamorgan, under the name of Lean and Hooley. The partnership was dissolved on 27 August 1881. Also in 1881, he became surveyor with Stow-on-the-Wold Highway Board and in 1884 he took up a similar position with the Maidstone Highway Board. He was appointed County Surveyor to Nottinghamshire County Council in 1889.

In his capacity as the County Surveyor, Hooley was passing a tarworks in 1901 when he noticed that a barrel of tar had been spilled on the roadway and that, in an attempt to reduce the mess, someone had dumped gravel on top of it. The area was remarkably dust-free compared to the surrounding road, and it inspired Hooley to develop and patent Tarmac in Britain, in 1902 (GB 7796).

He called his company, which he registered in 1903, Tar Macadam (Purnell Hooley's Patent) Syndicate Limited, but unfortunately he had trouble selling his product as he was not an experienced businessman. On 26 July 1904, Hooley obtained a US patent for an apparatus for the preparation of tar macadam, intended as an improvement to existing methods of preparing tar macadam.

Hooley's company was bought out by the Wolverhampton MP, Sir Alfred Hickman, who was also the owner of a steelworks which produced large quantities of waste slag. The Tarmac company was relaunched by Hickman in 1905.

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