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Ancient Roman Valves (2013)
- elric 7y agoIt's striking how wealthy Romans had running water in their homes, 2000 years ago, when my parents in rural Belgium (!), some sixty years ago, had to make do with wells and rain water. Even today, millions (billions?) of people don't have access to clean drinking water, let alone running water. We've come so far, yet not.
- jascii 7y agoAs it was made out of lead, I'm not sure Roman plumbing would hold up to today's definition of "clean drinking water". But yeah, todays access to clean drinking water is largely an economical issue, not so much a technical one.
- Razengan 7y agoA political issue, more like. A problem of nefficient distribution, not a lack of plenty.
- jeffdavis 7y agoDistribution is a vastly underestimated economic problem. Of course, politics can be a major factor too, but I wouldn't assume that politics is the problem just because there is plenty in one place and scarcity in another.
- russdill 7y agoDepending on the contents of the water the lead is not as much as an issue as you'd expect. (See Flint, MI)
- jascii 7y agoArcheological evidence suggests it was: https://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6594 https://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6594
- cosmodisk 7y agoThe average life expectancy was most likely less than it'd have taken to die from lead poisoning.
- dekhn 7y agoKind of.... in antiquity (really anything more than 100-150 years ago), age of average mortality was dominated by deaths of the extremely young... but the reality is that people who did survive, often lived to their late 50s and early 60s.
- quickthrowman 7y agoYep, if you survived childhood, you’d likely live long enough to see grandkids and ‘retire’ in Rome. In addition, a Roman army field medic/surgeon from the late republic/early empire onward was probably just as effective as any medic/doctor anywhere until the 19th century. Amputations, suturing lacerations, and so on didn’t really change at all until antiseptics and antibiotics. It’s crazy to think how medicine didn’t really advance for ~2000 years, and then vaccinations, antiseptics, and anesthesia (and later antibiotics) came into use and medicine advanced rapidly. Oh, add in a dash of germ theory and the scientific method, and stir. The Romans were really quite amazing!
- aksss 7y agoA) lead poisoning has horrible debilitating effects aside from death (death is not the important measure) B) Excluding infant mortality, you were generally good to go to 55-60 in Rome, about where the US was in 1920's or 30's time frame. C) that's plenty of time for acute or chronic lead poisoning to F anybody up.
- dredmorbius 7y agoNot really. Highest mortality was among infants and young children. Once you reached age 20, odds were quite good of living to 60. Elders of 80+ years were common. These are data from England and Wales, 1700 to present, but would all but certainly have been similar for ancient Rome: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-by-age-in-the-UK-1700-to-2013.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-b...
- mc32 7y agoHow much of it was lined with lead vs terra cotta. Most traversal was on aqueducts which I don’t think typically were lined with lead, but I’d love to be corrected on that.
- jascii 7y agoAqueducts are specific structures to span valleys when needed and certainly were not the primary structure to deliver water.
- dreamlayers 7y agoAqueducts are the whole long structure bringing water to a settlement, including bridges, tunnels and channels along the ground.
- monocasa 7y agoLead pipes are fine when the ph is the right level to create a barrier "passivization" layer within the pipe between the lead and the water. Rome's water's ph was naturally ok. The issue with Flint was that they increased the acidity of the water by changing the water source, which removed that barrier.
- jascii 7y agoYes, acidity plays a role in it. No, Rome is not Flint, and --if you want to believe archeological evidence-- its water supply was NOT ok. https://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6594 https://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6594
- quotemstr 7y agoThe lead plumbing was a lot less damaging than the lead acetate used to sweeten wine.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoThe wealthy only.
- bpodgursky 7y agoOnly the wealthy had clean water delivered to their homes, but public fountains were actually widespread, clean and free. This was in many ways better than the American/European average until pretty recently.
- jojobas 7y agoToday's EU/US poorest quartile people live better lives in absolute terms than European nobles mere 200 years ago.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sorokod 7y agoMy guess is that rural Belgians had to make do with wells and rain water 2000 years ago as well.
- jakedata 7y agoThe sophistication of Roman plumbing technology is not that surprising. The existence of "Valve Magazine" is slightly more so.
- rootbear 7y agoMany years ago I learned that the size of the specialty publication industry was just enormous. I don't know if that's still true, but the existence of "Valve Magazine" isn't too surprising to me. We had fun at work thinking up fake industrial specialty pubs, such as "Door Knob Monthly" and "Parking Meter Trends".
- usrusr 7y agoThat's how ad targeting was done before Google and Facebook. Now that you can buy valve buyer eyeballs while they are browsing cat pictures all those multitudes of specialisation are prone to do extinct. (and to GP: perhaps one day we might discover the remains of ancient Roman Valve Magazine!)
- notfromhere 7y agoSpecialty industry magazines are way better targeting than google. Their value also shot up post-GDPR as publishers realized how valuable their subscriber lists were to vendors.
- rsynnott 7y agoFake? https://www.doorindustryjournal.co.uk/ https://www.doorindustryjournal.co.uk/
- jakedata 7y agoThe _continued_ existence of "Valve Magazine" is slightly more so.
- Jaruzel 7y agoI'm still holding out for Walrus Polishers Monthly, tbh.
- Animats 7y agoThat's a nicely built valve. Looks like something from 1890. If the Romans had discovered the Bessemer process for making steel in quantity, the industrial revolution might have happened two thousand years sooner. They had a "steel industry", but could only make enough for swords and such. A Bessemer converter is much simpler than that valve. Would have changed history. The railroad era might have started around 150AD.
- rayhendricks 7y agoIMO that [Bessemer process] is really the sticking point that prevented the Ancient Romans from harnessing steam engines, and we had to wait until the early 18th century (1712ish) for the piston steam engine. The ancient romans did know of a rudimentary steam engine though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
- smacktoward 7y agoThe explanation I've always heard for why the Romans didn't industrialize had less to do with technology and more to do with economics. The Romans made extensive use of slave labor, so while they might have had the capacity to build engines and machines, there was simply no demand for anyone to do so -- why bother tinkering with machines when you can always just throw more slaves at your problems? Whereas in Britain slavery had mostly been confined to its colonies only, and the institution was abolished entirely between 1807 and 1833 -- the same period when industrialization really took off. A similar effect could be seen in the different ways the American North and South evolved after independence -- the North, which didn't have slaves, industrialized, while the slaveholding South remained stubbornly agricultural right up to the Civil War. The more expensive human muscle power becomes, the more attractive it becomes to replace muscles with machines. And a slave society is a society where muscle power will always be cheap.
- rayhendricks 7y agoThat does sound like a plausible explanation, however the United states industrialized and also had slavery until 1865 alright the south was less so.
- Baeocystin 7y agoLooks like the site got hugged to death. Does anyone have an archive link?
- Jerry2 7y agoThe reason why I found and submitted this story is because I came across this image of a Roman valve that was dug up in Pompeii: https://i.imgur.com/gX26IYG.jpg https://i.imgur.com/gX26IYG.jpg I found it to be absolutely amazing so I had to find out more about it.
- ilamont 7y agoYou should check out Pompeii, a historical fiction novel by Robert Harris. The main character is an engineer responsible for waterworks.
- CamperBob2 7y agoWow. They must have had wrenches and other passable hand tools as well. How in the world could they get that far, without managing to build and harness even rudimentary steam engines? If someone had described Hero's aeolipile to the people who built this plumbing, it might have made all the difference.
- rsynnott 7y agoI believe metallurgy was a serious issue for any possible Roman steam engine.
- jacobush 7y agoStill, a stationary power plant would have eminently doable in my not so humble opinion. Even stone for cylinder offers great compression strength. Make it big enough and the scale works out to your advantage. Bronze bearings could be made very durable.
- AstralStorm 7y agoThe reason is simple - Romans tended to use wood as fuel source. Steam engines started way after we decided to use coal instead. The wood heat is too low to get high pressure saturated steam, and lower pressure is not that useful and requires a huge boiler or specially prepared wood briquettes. Metallurgically, Romans knew of brass and copper, which is enough for a decent steam boiler. It would be rather expensive to make.
- H_Pylori 7y agoThe plug insert looks remarkably well made. It looks to have been turned in a rather precise, if crude, lathe (look at the the detail of the groove). This is even more impressive if you think that the first real modern lathes only date from the late 18th century. The plug insert could've been moulded by some sort of near net shape method, but I doubt it (the top part of the plug seems to be much more rougher in nature). The pics are too low resolution to make a definitive judgement.
- MrLeap 7y agoI've read/listened to convincing arguments that ancient Egypt had rather advanced lathe tech. https://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/egypt/articles/hrdfact3.php https://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/egypt/articles/hrd...
- alanbernstein 7y agoFascinating, those granite pieces seem extraordinary even for today's technology. Of course "buried in the oldest of Egyptian pyramids" is the ultimate in survivorship bias... But they still made at least one of them.
- hyperpallium 7y agoZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Valves
- peter303 7y agoIn many aspects ancient Roman technology was not superseded until the 1800s. 1500 years of unnecessary inferiority.