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Pompeii fixed potholes with molten iron (2019)
- tomcam 2y agoHere in Seattle they do nothing. At this point I’d be happy if they filled them with chewing gum, crack pipes, and McDonald’s wrappers.
- Dr_Birdbrain 2y agoI’m annoyed they don’t include pictures of the iron fillings.
- roschdal 2y agoShow me the proof please.
- grugagag 2y agohttps://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/roman-roads-0011920 https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/rom...
- onetimeuse92304 2y agoCall me sceptical. That would have been astronomically expensive given the enormous supply chain needed to produce charcoal to get that iron in those times. I am sceptical on how they figured out iron stains are pothole fillings. I think much simpler explanation would be everyday items or metal pieces of carts getting stuck between stones.
- jl6 2y agoI do find this quite hard to believe. Iron would be considered an expensive material to use in roadbuilding even today. The pictures aren't all that convincing. > But lead author Eric Poehler of the University of Massachusetts Amherst writes that stray iron drops found on the street suggest that the molten metal was carried from a furnace to the repair site. If the hypothesis is that they were capable of carrying molten metal from a furnace to the road, isn't it more likely that these are splashes or spills from molten iron en route to a blacksmith?
- yard2010 2y agoYou say "even", as if the Roman empire wasn't on par with the western empire today. I disagree. Even though we're at the tip of the ice berg, the human history is episodic in a way.
- sushisource 2y ago> as if the Roman empire wasn't on par with the western empire today Huh? I mean, no, technologically it... definitely wasn't. Remind me how many teraflops the most powerful Roman computer was capable of? The Romans were plenty advanced, sure, but that's just a nonsense statement.
- thriftwy 2y agoThey had huge stadiums, though. Modern people had very little idea why you would have a stone stadium until around XX century.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago> Remind me how many teraflops the most powerful Roman computer was capable of? Bad metric. We could go to the moon in the 70’s, and had supersonic passenger planes, and we could build at scale. Today California can’t build a train, building a nuclear powerplant takes 20 years and we can’t go to the moon and don’t have supersonic passenger planes. So we have partially regressed despite having more terraflops
- adriand 2y agoI'm currently reading a book about Cleopatra [1] (it's superb) and I've been absolutely boggled by the productive capacity of the nation states of her era. Whether it was building ships, growing and transporting grain or raising armies, these were highly sophisticated bureaucracies that knew how to make, grow and transport huge quantities of stuff. I'm at work and don't have the book on me, so I may have this slightly wrong, but IIRC, in Cleopatra's day Alexandria (where she resided with her court) was consuming 300 tons of grain per day, which arrived on ships via the Nile. Or consider the ability of Rome to draft and train legions of highly-skilled soldiers: it was at a scale similar to that of modern-day Russia. 1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7968243-cleopatra https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7968243-cleopatra
- lukan 2y agoI am somewhat sceptical, as iron was very expensive back then. And they do not come up with a working idea how they possibly could have done it in an economic way. Portable smelters were not really a thing. And building an oven next to every hole does not sound too practical either. At least not easier, than just fixing the holes with stones. Also shouldn't we have found other instances, where it was done? "The researchers found that repairs using liquefied ore were being carried out just before the city’s destruction." So my first (uneducated) guess would rather be, that hot lava might have tampered with the evidence.
- jl6 2y agoI also thought "hang on a minute. Pompeii? As in volcano Pompeii?" but apparently the city was never flooded with lava, but rather ash, which was cooler than would melt iron (still fatally hot though).
- lukan 2y agoThe eruption was a violent explosion with molten rocks flying around. Some of them probably hit the city and some of them contained lots of iron would be my guess.
- meindnoch 2y agoElemental iron is not present in rocks on Earth.
- lukan 2y agoBut iron ore is. And TFA literally talks about "liquified molten ore". And this is speculation, but I assume a molten ore rock from inside the vulcano shot outwards, might have enough energy and time to purify itself a bit (different elements have different density, centrifugal principle).
- cryptonector 2y ago
- ricree 2y agoUnless I'm mistaken, this strikes me as a really incredible claim. To the best of my knowledge, Rome didn't make much use out of cast iron. Iron has a very high melting point, it's not something that people were just casually melting. There were a few exceptions, but my understanding is that Europe mostly didn't use cast iron until late in the middle ages. The idea that some random resort town was casually melting iron and hauling it around to fill cracks strikes me as really implausible. Some other, more easily melted metal perhaps, but not iron. Not unless my understanding of Roman metallurgy is really mistaken.
- gfxxxx 2y agoNot only that, but the thermal stress of pouring molten iron on wet, cold and cracked stone.... call me skeptical
- jandrese 2y agoCount me as skeptical as well. Not only would it have been wildly impractical, but iron is prone to rusting and expands when it rusts. Plus it is slippery when wet. It's just not a good pothole filler.
- blacksmith_tb 2y agoAlso seems like the stone around it would wear more quickly and then instead of potholes you'd have iron bumps in the road, not much of an improvement.
- dukeofdoom 2y agoThey lived in really nice villas too. Frescos on the wall and mosaic floors. Better constructed than modern ones in some regards. No sqeeky floors for example. Surrounded by organic gardens with lemons and oranges and fragrant spices
- kragen 2y ago> most of the streets in the bustling seaside city were paved with silex, a type of cooled lava stone 'silex' is a rather old-fashioned word; nowadays it's more commonly called 'flint', which is a sedimentary rock, not an igneous one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silex > processing taconite, a type of low-grade iron ore taconite is typically 30%–35% iron, but it's true that most iron has historically been made from higher-grade ores than that (though throughout history iron has usually been made from lower-grade ores, just in much smaller quantities) it is indeed fairly surprising to find cast iron in a roman town. china had cast iron from around 2500 years ago, but i thought the technology only reached europe during medieval times, and even later in western europe
- OnlyMortal 2y agoFlint like “churt” used to make tools way back when?
- kragen 2y agoyes
- Modified3019 2y agoHuh, I would have bet $10 that flint was igneous. Given how glasslike it can be I thought it was related to obsidian. Turns out it’s sedimentary, and I overlooked considering all the non-volcanic places it can show up naturally. I guess it’s time to brush up on my geology and mineralogy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint
- jacobolus 2y agoYour Wikipedia link says: "The word silex was previously used to refer to flint and chert and sometimes other hard rocks." Seems this was a fairly generic word. According to http://doi.org/10.3764/aja.122.4.0579 http://doi.org/10.3764/aja.122.4.0579 which is the paper this blog post was based on, "The paving stones of Pompeii consist of a heavy, dark basaltic lava stone, which we describe as 'lava stone,' or silex, using the general Latin term. For local travertine stones, we use the common name, 'Sarno limestone.'" One of the authors of the paper wrote a book, The Traffic Systems of Pompeii, which has: "When covered in gravel or created in beaten earth, the surface was calld glarea, but when paved in harder stones, the term silex was applied."
- jjk166 2y agoThis article is incorrect. The actual claim is that the romans were making repairs with molten ore, ie slag, which has a substantially lower melting point than molten iron and would be a cheap byproduct of iron production.
- gfxxxx 2y agoThank you. I was extremely skeptical that they used molten iron.
- kortex 2y agoI believe this is the article: https://www.ajaonline.org/article/3863 https://www.ajaonline.org/article/3863 > In July 2014, we conducted a survey of Pompeii’s street network to document traces of iron that were observed on the stone-paved streets, which resulted in the identification of 434 instances of solid iron and iron staining among the paving stones. ... Pompeians were—in addition to using solid iron wedges—pouring molten iron and iron slag onto their streets as a method of emergency repair. There's a huge gulf of difference between "a civilization is capable of melting iron" and "molten iron is so cheap and easy they used it to fill potholes". Castable iron: Valuable, scarce, energy intensive, very hard to melt (comparatively), corrodes readily (especially on the coast) Iron and other metal slag: Byproduct of iron smelting, basically waste, melts fairly easily, was used as ballast in ships, comparatively cheap, rusts superficially but is mostly a matrix of oxides which don't meaningfully react I'm beyond skeptical that perfectly good cast iron was used to fill potholes. Using slag/dross/failed smelts/other byproducts of metallurgy makes far better sense. It would be like far future archeologists unearthing rammed earth tire walls and concluding "the 20th century was so efficient at producing rubber they used excess tires as a building material" vs "they used a waste product which would have been landfill anyways".
- kragen 2y agoand bloomery slag is always contaminated with bits of iron that never melted
- aidenn0 2y agoNo iron melts in a bloomery; the slag is liquid and the solid bits of iron sink to the bottom of it. Blast furnaces melt the iron, but weren't found in Europe until much later than the eruption of Vesuvius (China was just getting them around this time).
- kragen 2y agocorrect, that's why i said 'iron that never melted'
- dinkleberg 2y agoI wonder if this was just the doings of some eccentric in an act of euergetism (the wealthy supporting their cities through public works and the like) who thought that iron was just the thing. It was a resort city that attracted a lot of rich folk. It seems possible that rather than giving us insight into how the Romans maintained their cities it is just unveiling some small interesting idea someone brought into reality. It is unlikely we'll ever know for sure. But it is interesting to contemplate how much of what we think we know about the past could be just way off and we've invested too much into artifacts of odd occurrences that just happened to survive while the more mundane and "real" are lost to time.
- 12thhandyman 2y agoBadass article, super cool to think about filling pot holes with molten iron. Visited Pompeii with family when younger and one of the few things I remember “experiencing” were the wheel ruts while walking around. Very much makes sense now how difficult it’d be to fill in given the depth and width of the ruts; they’re expansive. Am not familiar with iron making but curious about iron slag. Welding slag is pretty light but if iron slag was used for ballast it must be substantial