Lemminkäinen becomes a road paving contractor
The history of asphalt paving began in Helsinki in the 1870s, when the sidewalks of Aleksanterin Street were paved with gussasphalt. The city centre streets were almost entirely cobblestoned up until the 1930s. From the very beginning of its paving operations, Lemminkäinen also paved yards and sidewalks with gussasphalt, which was made in wood-fired tar boilers.
Opening to a new branch
In the 1920s the so-called emulsion macadam method emerged as a competitor to street cobblestones, and Lemminkäinen followed the new trend without delay. The company embraced the idea of using bitumen emulsion for road paving and started its own emulsion production. Although Lemminkäinen’s achievements in the application of emulsion technology were modest, it was nonetheless an opening to a new branch, which was later to become extremely important for the company.
The new field developed rapidly. With the volume of traffic growing strongly, the switch was gradually made to hot-mix asphalt as a street paving material. The first pavement of this type was completed in Finland in 1930. Lemminkäinen watched developments closely, and in 1934 the creator of its road department, F. Hj. Wäänänen, designed the company’s own asphalt mixing machine. Product development continued and by the end of the decade the company already had three of its own asphalt plants.
Jorvas road made Lemminkäinen’s name as a asphalt paving contractor
Lemminkäinen certainly needed the capacity since paving works were expanding beyond the boundaries of the city. In 1938 Lemminkäinen got the contract to pave the western approach road to Helsinki, the so-called Jorvas Road. This 18-kilometre-long stretch of road from Lauttasaari to Espoonlahti was paved in the summers of 1938 and 1939. It was the largest continuous section of asphalt-paved road in the country prior to the Second World War.
The highly praised Jorvas Road served as a good advertisement for Lemminkäinen’s road department, and the work came flooding in. Unfortunately, however, the outbreak of war brought this booming business to an abrupt end, and it was to be years before paving works would be resumed. Nonetheless, in the fullness of time the formation of Lemminkäinen’s road department proved to be a great success.