In 1904, Herman and Jesse Besser patented the first concrete block machine. It weighed about two hundred pounds and produced one block every three minutes. Today, the Besser Company manufactures a 72,000 pound behemoth they call the Superpac capable of cranking out 3,240 blocks per hour - a 16,000% increase in production capacity.

Based on that level of innovation, you might rationally wonder why the National Science Foundation funded Watershed Materials’ quest to reinvent the concrete block machine. What could a small California startup offer a one hundred-year-old industry already awash in proven technology?

The answer is “a lot”.

The innovations that Besser and other industrial titans like Columbia, Hess, Masa, and Tiger bring to concrete block production aren’t focused on revolutionizing what a concrete block could be, but rather are focused on making what is basically the same concrete block they’ve always made, only much much faster - 160 times faster. The Watershed Materials team, on the other hand, wanted to go back to the beginning, to re-imagine the basic premises of what masonry could be - strong, resilient, beautiful, local, sustainable, and affordable.