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Dunno if the Romans couldn't have made it (their glassware was startlingly good for what we imagine was possible then, if you do a simple image search) but pre-
by lr4444lr 9y ago
Dunno if the Romans couldn't have made it (their glassware was startlingly good for what we imagine was possible then, if you do a simple image search) but pre-Pasteur, people wouldn't have have conceived of a vacuum seal formed by heat and pressure as a food preservation technique worth pursuing.
- virmundi 9y agoNor could they have made a rubber for the seal. They didn't have access to the plants (Nazi's tried to use the only source that would have been available at the time to the Romans and failed [1]). Think of the supply chain required to get rubber plants from Asian or the Congo to a Roman city. Carthage would have had a hard time too. Even if they had rubber in enough quantity, they'd have to vulcanize [2] it to make it work. That was years, centuries beyond them. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rubber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rubber 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcanization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcanization Edited for the vulcanization.
- lr4444lr 9y agoTrue, not out of rubber. But remember that air-blocking seals were important for the control of the fermentation process in wine production and preservation, and it's not beyond possible that they could have refined cruder pitch and resin based solutions if germ theory had been better understood then.