[HN Gopher] Ancient Roman Valves (2013)
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Ancient Roman Valves (2013)
Author : Jerry2
Score : 86 points
Date : 2020-02-24 01:40 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.valvemagazine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.valvemagazine.com)
| jakedata wrote:
| The sophistication of Roman plumbing technology is not that
| surprising.
|
| The existence of "Valve Magazine" is slightly more so.
| Jerry2 wrote:
| The 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
|
| I found it to be absolutely amazing so I had to find out more
| about it.
| elric wrote:
| It'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.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| The wealthy only.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Only 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.
| sorokod wrote:
| My guess is that rural Belgians had to make do with wells and
| rain water 2000 years ago as well.
| jascii wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| Lead 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.
| quotemstr wrote:
| The lead plumbing was a lot less damaging than the lead
| acetate used to sweeten wine.
| Razengan wrote:
| A political issue, more like. A problem of nefficient
| distribution, not a lack of plenty.
| russdill wrote:
| Depending on the contents of the water the lead is not as
| much as an issue as you'd expect. (See Flint, MI)
| cosmodisk wrote:
| The average life expectancy was most likely less than it'd
| have taken to die from lead poisoning.
| aksss wrote:
| A) 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 wrote:
| Not 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-b...
| dekhn wrote:
| Kind 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| How 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.
| Animats wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| IMO 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
| smacktoward wrote:
| The 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I've read that too, and always were skeptical.
|
| The Romans obviously made extensive use of technology, and
| their peers didn't advance much more quickly than they did,
| with the massive capitalization of slave and other labors.
| Nor did the vassal states within the "boundaries" that we
| find in history books.
| LessDmesg wrote:
| That's a valid point, of course. However, abolition of
| slavery is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient
| one. Remember e.g. the Black Plague in Europe which led to
| a sharp increase in the value of human resources and caused
| some positive effects like the rise of free cities,
| powerful guilds of professionals, and the Renaissance of
| arts and sciences. However, things stopped short of an
| industrial revolution: it took some 3 or 4 centuries more
| to come around.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Who is making the claim that the Romans didn't
| industrialize? They may not have gone through the
| industrial revolution, but I find the claim that they
| didn't have industrial output to be nonsensical/doubly when
| trying to connect the lack of a "full scale industrial
| revolution" to slavery, which is some weird myth that
| refuses to die.
|
| Romans heavily implemented new processes for things such as
| mining, milling, and shipping. The slavery angle doesn't
| pass any form of smell test. If the claim is true, why
| would any society that ever had slavery ever do anything?
| Romans had waterwheels that drove machinery and used
| generated power to automate many aspects of their society.
| marbu wrote:
| Agreed, it's especially worth looking at particular
| examples of Roman industry, such as Las Medulas gold
| mines. That said, while we could assume that slavery
| angle wasn't ruling out industrialization entirely, it
| wasn't pushing towards it either.
| rayhendricks wrote:
| That does sound like a plausible explanation, however the
| United states industrialized and also had slavery until
| 1865 alright the south was less so.
| smacktoward wrote:
| Apologies, I edited my comment to address the US
| comparison before I saw your comment. Sorry to have
| ninja'ed you!
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Far as I understand there are two issues. One is before
| coking was developed you couldn't use coal to produce iron.
| You needed to use charcoal from trees. Which Italy had a
| limited supply of. Iron production also competes with using
| wood as fuel and building supplies.
|
| There is also a transportation problem. The inputs for steel
| manufacture are large. To be economic you needed fuel and ore
| in close proximity.
|
| Sweden was a power house based on high quality iron ore
| deposits and vast pine forests. Which they cut down pretty
| much completely. I think India with fast growing tropical
| forests was also a large exporter of iron.
|
| Britain initially had large forests and iron ore. But also
| huge reserves of coal almost on top of their ore deposits.
| That allowed them to keep going once the forests were gone.
| aksss wrote:
| It's an underappreciated irony that coal save the trees and
| the whales (coal gas supplanted whale oil at a time when
| whales were being hunted to extinction, deforestation in
| America was dramatically retarded after coal reduced the
| need for wood for charcoal).
|
| Oil and gas are reducing our reliance on coal.
|
| Barring some new discovery about energy sources, nuclear is
| probably the only thing that can appreciably reduce our
| reliance on fossil fuels.
| didericis wrote:
| I think there are way too many technical problems related
| to transporting energy through the atmosphere, launch
| expense, and materials science to make any satellite
| based energy systems viable, but I've heard of some
| really cool concepts, like one that relies on dragging a
| tether and somehow harvesting huge amounts of energy to
| beam back to earth.
|
| Does anyone know if those are as far off/unrealistic as
| they sound?
| AngryData wrote:
| Large space-based solar installations are feasible, the
| only big problem is transmission of the power, usually
| proposed via laser or directed energy beam to the ground.
| That is technically feasible, but nobody has ever
| attempted to wirelessly transmit such high levels of
| sustained energy over long distances. Depending on the
| transmitter and receiver efficiencies and what
| wavelengths are used a lot of power could be lost and
| there are potential disasters like missing your target
| receiver with your energy beam, or interactions of the
| air with such a high powered beam, or EM 'pollution' from
| an imperfect transmitter.
|
| As for something like tethering orbiting objects or the
| like, it is all still theoretical. A space elevator
| requires similar material technologies and nobody has
| found a way to feasibly build such a large, strong, and
| light tether or chain. But that isn't something I would
| expect to see any time soon.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| The Romans were not good at adopting technology when they found
| it (conquered it). Seems they continued using oxen to pull
| loads when they had knowledge of horse collars. Would have
| doubled their 'speed of commerce'. Probably the inertia stemmed
| from being one of the worlds largest bureaucracies.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Oxen are stronger, heavier, and have other uses besides
| pulling loads.
|
| Horses are faster, but oxen are way more efficient. But were
| widely used right until transport mechanization, neither
| replaced the other.
| ip26 wrote:
| Supposedly horse traces were also much more expensive to
| make & maintain compared to an ox yoke.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Compare that to Alexander the Great, who adopted so much
| foreign practices that his people started to hate him
| quotemstr wrote:
| We have no right to judge the Romans for that when we still
| write new programs in C.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| IIRC there's a controversy around horse collars in history as
| most of the horse collars shown/found (I forget which)
| wouldn't work -- they apparently [would] strangle the horse.
|
| Something along the lines mentioned here: https://en.wikipedi
| a.org/wiki/Horse_collar#Earliest_predeces...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There's little to no coal in Italy. Nearest reserves are in
| (present-day) northern Spain, a very long sea voyage, possible
| only May - November.
|
| Coal throughout Europe is mostly in the northern band, from
| Scotland, _especially_ in Cornwall, France, Germany, and
| present-day Czech Republic and Poland. Where industrialisation
| happened, for the most part.
|
| England's coal mines were near the sea, and river/canal
| transport, and could be moved readily by ship elsewhere in the
| country.
|
| Coal in the US didn't come into wide use until after
| substantial rail infrastructure was built out (the 1880s), with
| high-grade Bessemer steel, capable of bearing heavy coal cars.
| Until then, wood, usually locally-sourced, was the preferred
| fuel.
| LessDmesg wrote:
| The industrial revolution's main prerequisite is not a
| converter or any other clever device. It's about power sources.
| When you've got e.g. a bunch of coal that gives off lots of
| thermal energy, finding ways to transform that energy (with
| engines, factory machining etc) becomes a hot open engineering
| contest with good solutions being a matter of years, and
| optimal ones, of decades or centuries (i.e. much longer than
| Roman history).
|
| But if you ain't got the energy, then making any devices,
| however clever, isn't going to change the tide. Antique and
| medieval civilizations had some rather elaborate mechanisms
| like the antikythera, the trebuchet, rapid-fire crossbows in
| China etc. But without a major source of low-cost energy, none
| of them succeeded with an industrial revolution: large-scale
| coal-mining was what did it in the end.
| Merrill wrote:
| The first steam engines were motivated by the need to pump
| water out of coal mines.
| https://www.egr.msu.edu/~lira/supp/steam/
|
| This was long before Bessemer and less expensive steel.
| hbbio wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| There is a Newcomen on display (it's not small...) at the
| National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
|
| Edit: cf. https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-
| collections/stories/scienc...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| And all of that generated about 5 hp (3.7 kW), at about
| 1-3% efficiency of thermal energy to motive power.
|
| Watt's engines were about 10-20 hp, and about 10%
| efficient. Peak efficiency of a triple-expansion steam
| engine approached 25%. The best thermal engines today
| (combined-cycle steam turbines) approach 50%, and have a
| far better power-to-weight ratio.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > When you've got e.g. a bunch of coal that gives off lots of
| thermal energy, finding ways to transform that energy (with
| engines, factory machining etc) becomes a hot open
| engineering contest with good solutions being a matter of
| years
|
| Not really; people had bunches of coal giving off lots of
| thermal energy forever. They used it in the obvious way,
| burning it for heat in winter. This didn't lead to much in
| the way of technological advance.
|
| > and optimal ones, of decades or centuries (i.e. much longer
| than Roman history).
|
| How is "centuries" "much longer than Roman history"? Roman
| history goes on for more than 700 years, and that's just the
| history of Rome as a major international power centered on
| the city in Italy. The Byzantine Empire, or -- as it called
| itself -- the Roman Kingdom, with extensive cultural and
| institutional continuity, went on for another 1000 years
| after that.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Looks like the site got hugged to death. Does anyone have an
| archive link?
| H_Pylori wrote:
| The 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.
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