Samuel Allen Face Jr. (August 2, 1923 – May 2, 2001) was an American inventor and co-developer of some of the most important advances in concrete floor technology and wireless controls. Early life Face was born at the home of his maternal grandparents in City Point, Virginia. He attended Norfolk Public Schools and graduated from Matthew Fontaine Maury High School, the Norfolk Division of William and Mary/VPI (now Old Dominion University) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His maternal grandfather, J. Fred Muhlig (1876–1948), also an MIT graduate, once worked as an engineer under Thomas Edison in West Orange, New Jersey. After four years of employment as a marine engineer and naval architect at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, in 1951, this ninth generation resident of Hampton Roads joined the family of companies founded by his great-grandfather Edward Webster Face (1829–1907) in 1867. Concrete Industry Mr. Face was best known for his role in the 1970s, 80s and 90s in the development of the technologies and the design/installation practices that became the world standard for the specification, control and measurement of the flatness and levelness of concrete. The Face Floor Profile Numbering System ("F-Numbers") has been adopted by the American Concrete Institute, the American Society for Testing and Materials, the Canadian Standards Association, the World Bank and is more widely used with each passing year. A system that is a slight modification of F-Numbers is used in much of Europe. Sam Face's personal field consulting on construction projects in more than 20 countries helped create the modern industrial and commercial concrete floor. In the 1970s, working with Canada's top concrete contractor on numerous projects in greater Toronto, Mr. Face developed the placement and finishing practices that resulted in what he called "Superflat Floors," known to many at the time as "Sam Face floors." Superflat floors are now part of the standard lexicon of the concrete industry. As of 2014, the consulting company he helped create had provided services on more than 8,000 projects on five continents. The measuring instruments he co-invented have been used to measure billions of square feet of floors and roadways around the world and are specified by the United States Federal Highway Administration and the World Bank. Over the last 20 years of Face's life, the use of the Face flat floor technologies and processes resulted in a 100% improvement in concrete floor