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As 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 drinkin
by jascii 7y ago
As 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.