Ancient Roman Valves (2013)

https://www.valvemagazine.com/web-only/categories/manufacturing/4947-ancient-roman-valves.html

by Jerry2 • 6 years ago

214 107 6 years ago

elric• 6 years ago

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.

jascii5• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

A political issue, more like. A problem of nefficient distribution, not a lack of plenty.

russdill• 6 years ago

Depending on the contents of the water the lead is not as much as an issue as you'd expect. (See Flint, MI)

cosmodisk• 6 years ago

The average life expectancy was most likely less than it'd have taken to die from lead poisoning.

mc32• 6 years ago

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.

monocasa3• 6 years ago

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.

quotemstr2• 6 years ago

The lead plumbing was a lot less damaging than the lead acetate used to sweeten wine.

JoeAltmaier5• 6 years ago

The wealthy only.

bpodgursky• 6 years ago

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.

jojobas2• 6 years ago

Today's EU/US poorest quartile people live better lives in absolute terms than European nobles mere 200 years ago.

sorokod• 6 years ago

My guess is that rural Belgians had to make do with wells and rain water 2000 years ago as well.

jakedata2• 6 years ago

The sophistication of Roman plumbing technology is not that surprising.

The existence of "Valve Magazine" is slightly more so.

rootbear• 6 years ago

Many 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".

usrusr2• 6 years ago

That'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!)

rsynnott3• 6 years ago

Fake?

https://www.doorindustryjournal.co.uk/

jakedata2• 6 years ago

The _continued_ existence of "Valve Magazine" is slightly more so.

Jaruzel• 6 years ago

I'm still holding out for Walrus Polishers Monthly, tbh.

peter3032• 6 years ago

There is a whole genre of of industrial musical shows consisting of composers and actors. They perform at company conventions. In 2018 a collector of industrial musical records made an amusing documentary on the subject called "Bathtubs over Broadway".

https://www.bathtubsoverbroadway.com/

animal531• 6 years ago

Here in my country the biggest car trading website is called autotrader. For fun someone at my previous job typed in horsetrader and lo and behold, we apparently also had a horse trading site.

Niche anything can be pretty surprising.

perl4ever• 6 years ago

Where I used to work, for some reason someone was always leaving around logistics trade journals.

jorblumesea• 6 years ago

Winter 2020 Edition: Valves in Space!

https://cloud.3dissue.com/24685/25516/33805/2020-v1-Winter/i...

emmelaich• 6 years ago

You'd be astonished at the number of person-years that went into almost everything you use or see everyday.

Speaking as someone who had a stint at designing manhole covers and valves among other things.

Animats2• 6 years ago

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.

rayhendricks2• 6 years ago

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

smacktoward2• 6 years ago

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.

Gibbon14• 6 years ago

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.

LessDmesg2• 6 years ago

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.

Merrill2• 6 years ago

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.

thaumasiotes• 6 years ago

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.

LordHeini• 6 years ago

Well I think it is more about the human power sources.

Only the usage of more efficient crops like potatoes and the import of fertilizer like guano enabled the people of the industrial revolution to work in factories instead on the fields.

No pre industrial civilization was able to feed so many people not working in agriculture.

JoeAltmaier5• 6 years ago

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.

marcosdumay2• 6 years ago

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.

gentleman11• 6 years ago

Compare that to Alexander the Great, who adopted so much foreign practices that his people started to hate him

pbhjpbhj• 6 years ago

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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_collar#Earliest_predeces...

quotemstr2• 6 years ago

We have no right to judge the Romans for that when we still write new programs in C.

cryptonector• 6 years ago

Roman society was a slave society. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about the economic differences between the American North and South. I suspect a similar comparison is fair between ancient slave states and Industrial Revolution countries (England, Northern State in pre-Civil War U.S.).

dredmorbius4• 6 years ago

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.

Merrill2• 6 years ago

England had an advantage in that coal mines, iron mines and limestone quarries were reasonably close together, facilitating the smelting of iron.

nwallin• 6 years ago

Part of the reason the Bessemer process is so cheap is because it's burning the impurities in the steel to heat it. You heat up one batch enough to melt it and begin combusting the carbon and other impurities, and use the hot exhaust gas to heat the next batch. You still need some additional fuel, but not nearly as much as with competing processes.

Within a few years, the Bessemer process reduced the cost of steel by something like 85%. Most of that savings was a result of reduced coal usage.

There's little to no coal in Italy.

Nor is there copper or tin. Cornwall was a significant source of tin during the Bronze Age, and was a significant part of the reason Rome invaded Britain. (there was accessible copper in Cyprus, just not in Italy itself.)

allemagne• 6 years ago

It's interesting to speculate about an industrial Rome, but I'm more convinced that the industrial revolution was just as much facilitated by the political and economic institutions of 18th century England, things that Rome never had.

The story about "flexible glass" during the reign of Tiberius Caesar is probably false, but illustrates how technological innovation is expected to be received when there are powerful gatekeepers to broad technological change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_glass

You see similar actions by technophobic rulers in Ming China following the voyages of Zheng He or even in 16th century England: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lee_(inventor)

Entrenched interests usually would much rather maintain the status quo than enable anything potentially disruptive. The industrial revolution started because it was infeasible for any one powerful group in England to oppose innovation.

ratacat• 6 years ago

Not to mention the discovery of vulcanized rubber. You can't have an industrial revolution without hoses, gaskets, and tires.

fsloth• 6 years ago

I totally agree. The financial and societal aspects are as much important as the technological development in kick-starting industrial revolution. As an engineer, I've come to believe the main reason industrial revolution happened when it did was not the sudden advancement of science, but the emergence of stable and inclusive economy based on commerce and private property and the inclusive political system that did not allow incumbent to stifle innovation through force.

alanbernstein2• 6 years ago

That's a great little story, I assume untrue, where the "flexible glass" was just chosen as a mythical invention, to make the point. Similar to the "acid that dissolves any material" story.

Reading it, I thought how fantastic it would be if that material had actually been around for centuries. Then of course, the end of the article links to gorilla glass, a material we all use daily and barely even think about. Do we live in mythical times?

Baeocystin• 6 years ago

Looks like the site got hugged to death. Does anyone have an archive link?

Jerry22• 6 years ago

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.

ilamont• 6 years ago

You should check out Pompeii, a historical fiction novel by Robert Harris. The main character is an engineer responsible for waterworks.

CamperBob2• 6 years ago

Wow. 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.

rsynnott3• 6 years ago

I believe metallurgy was a serious issue for any possible Roman steam engine.

agumonkey3• 6 years ago

thanks a lot for your initiative

Gibbon14• 6 years ago

If you want more they found a four cylinder piston powered bilge pump in a roman wreck.

Jerry22• 6 years ago

four cylinder piston powered bilge pump in a roman wreck

Thanks for a tip! While I couldn't find exactly what you mentioned, I did find this picture of a bearing from a Roman bilge pump:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/0ZUWbEmiTXWf...

hyperpallium2• 6 years ago

Amazing! Lead is unfortunately malleable.

In 2000 years, they may say it of "plastic".

H_Pylori• 6 years ago

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.

MrLeap• 6 years ago

I've read/listened to convincing arguments that ancient Egypt had rather advanced lathe tech.

https://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/egypt/articles/hrd...

alanbernstein2• 6 years ago

Fascinating, 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.

hyperpallium2• 6 years ago

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Valves

peter3032• 6 years ago

In many aspects ancient Roman technology was not superseded until the 1800s. 1500 years of unnecessary inferiority.

Ancient Roman Valves (2013)

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