Tiles
A tile is a manufactured piece of hard-wearing material such as ceramic, stone, porcelain, metal or even glass. Tiles are generally used for covering roofs, floors, and walls, or other objects such as tabletops. more...
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Another category are the ceiling tiles, made from lightweight materials such as perlite and mineral wool. The word is derived from the French word tuile, which is, in turn, from the Latin word tegula, meaning a roof tile composed of baked clay. Less precisely, the modern term can refer to any sort of construction tile or similar object, such as rectangular counters used in playing games (see tile-based game).
Tiles are often used to form wall and floor coverings, and can range from simple square tiles to complex mosaics. Tiles are most often made from ceramic, with a hard glaze finish, but other materials are also commonly used, such as glass, slate, and reformed ceramic slurry, which is cast in a mould and fired.
In the past twenty years, the technology surrounding porcelain tile and glass tiles have increased, moving both from a niche marketplace to a place of prominence in the tile community.
Roof tiles
Roof tiles are designed mainly to keep out rain, and are traditionally made from locally available materials such as clay or slate. Modern materials such as concrete and plastic are also used and some clay tiles have a waterproof glaze.
A large number of shapes (or \"profiles\") of roof tiles have evolved. These include:
Flat tiles - the simplest type, which are laid in regular overlapping rows. This profile is suitable for stone and wooden tiles, and most recently, solar cells.;
Roman tiles - flat in the middle, with a concave curve at one end at a convex curve at the other, to allow interlocking.;
Pantiles - with an S-shaped profile, allowing adjacent tiles to interlock. These result in a ridged pattern resembling a ploughed field.;
Mission or barrel tiles are semi-cylindrical tiles made by forming clay around a log and laid in alternating columns of convex and concave tiles.;
Roof tiles are 'hung' from the framework of a roof by fixing them with nails. The tiles are usually hung in parallel rows, with each row overlapping the row below it to exclude rainwater and to cover the nails that hold the row below.
There are also roof tiles for special positions, particularly where the planes of the several pitches meet. They include ridge, hip and valley tiles.
Invention
The earliest finds of roof tiles are documented from a very restricted area around Corinth (Greece), where fired tiles began to replace thatchet roofs at two temples of Apollo and Poseidon between 700-650 BC. Spreading rapidly, roof tiles were within fifty years in evidence for a large number of sites around the Eastern Mediterranean, including Mainland Greece, Western Asia Minor, Southern and Central Italy. Early roof tiles showed an S-shape, with the pan and cover tile forming one piece. They were rather bulky affairs, weighting around 30 kg apiece. Being more expensive and labour-intensive to produce than thatchet, their introduction has been explained with their greatly enhanced fire resistance, giving desired protection to the costly temples.
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