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Of course ancient Roman concrete is better than what we have now. The ancient Roman concrete that wasn't better than what we have now, didn't survive to today.
by brilee 13y ago
Of course ancient Roman concrete is better than what we have now. The ancient Roman concrete that wasn't better than what we have now, didn't survive to today. There was probably a wide range of random kinds of concrete, and a 2000-year experiment has told us which of those random kinds was the best.
- jjtheblunt 13y agoGood point.
- speeder 13y agoMore or less... There are Roman-era writings describing their most common method of making concrete. What made me flabbergasted is that only NOW someone say this is news... Seriously, if the thing was written down already 2000 years ago, why noone bothered to test? Or they did, but other reasons made corporations not use it? My dad is a engineer, and he told me that some old bridges here in Brazil made with such concrete are REALLY HARD to explode for some reason... I don't know if that is the case with the bridge that Luisa Erundina tried to explode in São Paulo, but here we have a bridge that there was 4 attempts to explode by a specialized demolitions engineering company, and it barely got dented. EDIT: of course, most common for important buildings... Poor people won't use that sort of concrete, one of the ingredients is volcanic ash, and you cannot find volcanic ash everywhere, it was probably more or less expensive.
- dhughes 13y agoThe formula for (Roman) concrete was lost for centuries or the Romans didn't share it which also makes sense if you're a militaristic society why give away the secret to concrete? And it's only recently the secret of Roman concrete was discovered. Also I don't think Roman concrete is exactly the same as what we think of concrete it's not like the Romans poured it out into forms as is done today.
- SmokyBorbon 13y agoIf by recently you mean like 50 years ago, then yes, recently.
- Turing_Machine 13y agoCompared to how long it's been since the Empire fell, yeah, that's quite recent.
- reeses 13y agoI also greatly enjoyed the claims that a pre-industrial society's building methods were "greener" than those used on a massive scale today. I think I sprained an eye muscle from the abrupt roll.