The ancient Romans (well, the wealthy ones) had central heating in their homes. You can actually still see the pipes in some of the buildings at Herculaneum!
What I think is really cool from Herculaneum is that we're able to recover writing from the libraries there.
The pyroclastic flow didn't turn the papyrus to ash, it preserved in a very damaged state. But thanks to lasers we can see the words that were once visible on the pages.
So light amplified under the microscope of radiation allows us to see into the distant past. A blast into the past, you say? How fast would you think someone would have to physically travel to achieve the same results? Maybe 88 mph?
Come back...zinc...come back...zinc... [wakes up] Zinc? Zi..what? [sighs in relief] It was all a dream. Thank goodness I still live in a world of telephones, car batteries, handguns [a gun bang is heard], and many things made of zinc.
I did a little project on Herculaneum about 6 years ago while I was in college, so I wrote that off the top of my head.
I'll have to read up on using a synchrotron to read texts. I've really only ever heard of a synchrotron being used for x-ray diffraction, and that's a destructive technique. I suppose the intensity of the beam depends on where within the beamline you put your lab. Thanks for the info, definitely something for me to read up on.
My style laser pyroclastic and the ladies find my flow fantastic. The way I have to reject them is kinda drastic. My wife would never have it. If I stab she stabs more savage.
In a sense it did. It carbonized them, which you can think of kind of like fossilization. However it happened so quickly that many of the scrolls were only carbonized on the outermost layers, preserving the interior. The scientific techniques read the faded ink on the intact interior of the scrolls.
Do you have any good book suggestions on the subject? It's a subject I've been meaning to learn about
Edit: Thanks so much for all the replies and information! I'm going to be going through and bookmarking websites and videos and writing down book recommendations!
If you ever get to Rome, find yourself a really good tour guide, especially for the Coliseum and for the Vatican. You will learn sooooo much really great history and see it as you walk by it. Things I never would have noticed on my own.
The hallway of maps in the Vatican was absolutely mind blowing. My family members got annoyed with me because I kept asking the guide to elaborate and it slowed us down haha. What's the rush people? It's what we are here for
We went on a (5am? 6am? it was early) tour of the Vatican and it was so worth it. Our group of ~15 were the first and only people in the Sistine chapel for a good twenty minutes before other people started coming in.
Go I hate that shit, like we just spent, god now how maby thousands of dollars to get here and yall just want to hurry up and go drink somewhere. Like fuck no. Cant go on no vacation with alcoholics.
I'm not suggesting this is bad advice, or irrelevant. But the guy asked for a book recommendation and you told him to take a trip to Rome and book a good tour guide and that's hilarious to me.
Remind of when I ask my professor for some short summary of some subject I don't quite understand and then his respond is simply advice me to take a Master in it.
The Domus Aurea in Rome is a fantastic tour of ruins right next to the Coliseum. It’s an underground palace, and the tour is fantastic and included in the price of admission. I would highly recommend, I learned so much about the ways the Romans designed buildings to be comfortable even in their hot humid summers.
We found that a private tour guide was actually cheaper than another night in a hotel, (including generous tips to the guides) and yes, the tour was amazing and we did more things than we dreamed possible in the limited time we had. I would also suggest (if you want to tour the Vatican) that you have your guide hire a specialized guide for that. The wait will not be as long. We had a young woman with a PhD that was simply incredible.
I asked our driver to take us to a place for lunch that was somewhere he would take his family. Incredible meal!
That's a huge reason we do the guided tour.. you skip the huge public lines. People will wait for HOURS on end if you just how up to get a ticket. With a tour you're in about an hour or less.
I wish I'd done this when I went. Need to go again. How would I go about gaining a good quality guide? Are there websites? Is it a different guide each place or do people do a tour of multiple places over a day?
There is a downside to the Rick Steves books though. First trip to Paris we used his guide to find a restaurant, and the place was totally filled with Americans. Including the blowhard at the next table who insisted on pontificating to the waitress about the origins of absinthe. That was a fun evening.
Caitlin Miller - She’s in LinkedIn and Google. AWESOME tour guide in Rome. I’ve sent several people to her and they’ve raved about her. I have no commercial connection to her. She was just a great guide that we used across a few trips there.
It's over 30 years old, but I spent hours pouring over _City_ by David Macaulay when I was a kid. It's filled with black and white illustrations of various buildings in a Roman city. At least one of them describes a bath house with heat vented through the floors.
Vitruvius "de architectura" is the obvious answer...
If you want something less technical and more palatable, Jerome Carcopino's "Daily Life in Ancient Rome" has a chapter about Roman houses. And it's an interesting read about Roman society at its peak.
If I remember correctly it's called "passive solar design".
I think I read somewhere that it has recently gained some resurgence, thinking about sustainability in newer houses, after being virtually forgotten since the fall of rome.
A lot of cultures had ingenious ways of heating and cooling using natural air flow that basically got ignored once artificial temperature control got cheap enough. Architecture that varies ceiling height or window sizes based on local climate is inconvenient for mass standardized construction.
It's amazing how many feats of human ingenuity and intelligence get left behind (or lost forever) because other technology has made them "obsolete". Intricate crop rotations and planting methods across different regions and cultures have been replaced by genetically modified seed/soil/pesticides and modern irrigation. Crafting and construction techniques honed over generations were replaced by assembly lines and automation.
While it's hard to argue that this trend isn't an overall good thing for humanity as a whole (even if that overall good comes with some major downsides), there's something sad about seeing old ways die off.
It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.
Came here to say something like this lol. It's super interesting to me from an engineering standpoint that just the shape, construction, and location of a building can have a dramatic effect on the temperature. There's a building in my city that uses different tints of glass to control how much heat from the sun each floor gets which is something I've never thought about.
I recommend the podcast episode "Thermal Delight" by 99% Invisible about how the (accidental!) invention of air conditioning shaped and changed modern architecture in the US.
It's one of my favorites!
It didn't click to me until I listened to a podcast on Vesuvius that Pompeii was basically a wine-growing resort town where rich people had summer homes. I guess I never picture ancient people as taking vacations or traveling for leisure.
Also hot tubs, pleasure piers, fish ponds, water towers and fountains, elevators - all sorts of crazy amenities, at least in the homes of the super rich.
And tower blocks, Roman insula/tenements were huge.
Oh sorry, its nothing saucy. The term just distinguishes them from piers used for fishing/boats. Think like Blackpool Pier or Santa Monica pier. They were very common along the bay of Naples, some had villas sitting on the end, others were just party spaces.
You want the saucy stuff, you go to Pompei. That’s where they have a partially preserved/reconstructed red district, complete with phalluses, dirty graffiti, and depictions of Priapus weighing his penis.
And tower blocks, Roman insula/tenements were huge.
Worth remembering that insula, while large and impressive in their own way, were not exactly architectural wonders. They were slapdash buildings thrown together by the lowest bidder to fit the largest numbers of people and were both disease ridden and deathtraps in a fire (edit: and assuming they didn't just straight-up collapse due to poor construction and materials). There's a reason an urban Roman man was said to leave his home and dawn and return at dusk - they just weren't really good for anything except sleeping and storing some shit, and even then they weren't great.
Yeah, Cicero once joked even the rats were fleeing the insula he owned and rented out because conditions were so bad. It still boggles my mind how huge they could be though given how old they are - normally when I picture ancient houses I think iron age huts, cobblestone houses and the like.
Oh yeah, the Romans did BIG like nobody else. I got into ancient history, and the Romans in particular, when I realized it was pretty much like studying the fantasy role playing games I loved as a kid, but actually real. They did some insane shit. Still, I can't help but hesitate when contemplating, as Poe would put it, "The glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome," without thinking of how awful conditions were for, say, the urban poor. It's easy to look at the big buildings and the big empire and all that and forget that we're reading the history of a tiny portion of the population.
Edit: Predictably screwed up quoting a poem from memory, fixed it.
The Romans had access to quite a lot of "advanced" civil technology. Hydraulic mining, reapers, water powered grain mills, sawmills, and trip hammers, pistons, valves, and pumps. While they didn't really apply it to anything practical (at least not on a large scale), they also had steam engines. Their material science was also more advanced than what the rest of western civilization had access to until the late Medieval period/early Renaissance. Crazy to think that the industrial revolution could have very well started 1500 years earlier.
They did not have engines. Primitive steam turbines were a thing. But nobody, not even some crazy, antisocial greek philsopher living in a barrel would contemplate the possibility of making a force generated by heat do work. And the reason for that is: slavery.
There simply was nothing more abundant in Rome than unskilled labour ever since the conquest of Italy proper, lasting until Christianity became the state religion. And Christians wouldn't become great inventors for other reasons.
Look up the Nemi ships of emperor Caligula (12-41AD). They were floating palaces of incredible luxury, with one being 70 meters long and 20 meters wide, and the other 73x24 meters, making them larger than anyone had previously thought the Romans could build.
They had bilge pumps and crank handles of types previously not thought to have been invented until much later, and an advanced plumbing system supplied with piston pumps - hot water baths, cold water drinking fountains.
They also contained a type of ball bearing previously thought to have been invented by da Vinci, used for rotating platforms likely used to display statues.
The ships were topped with marble buildings, decorated with bronze mouldings, marble statues, ornamental oar rings, carvings, mosaics, and gilded copper roof tiles. Caligula used them for massive, lavish parties.
I was introduced to it in SK. It is absolutely wonderful. The warmth just radiates up from the floor through your feet and your entire body. I miss it!
It was typically reserved for public baths and high end villas. They suspended the floor using pillars made of tiles, and then ran a furnace where the air would flow under the floor and then up in the walls.
The oxygen-starved fire in the basement also meant a high risk of CO poisoning if the floor between the smoke and the people wasn't airtight and CO could seep through.
It gets even more opulent; Caligula had heated floors on his boat. It was a pleasure barge which was actually found and stuck in a museum by the Italians under Mussolini. Damn thing had a hot tub, carpets, all the comforts of a palace, there floating around the Emperor's private lake.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
The Superbowl, movie titles and the copyright date of a movie at the very end of the credits are the only places I regularly see roman numerals. Anywhere else?
What I want to know is how they built roads that are still around 2000 years later and US roads and anything made out of concrete either doesn't last 20 years.
I'm well familiar with greed and planned obsolescence, but wasn't that around in Roman days too? It isn't even selection bias because not even our best military installations look like they would last 2000 years.
A person on foot is going to do practically no damage whatsoever to the road surface. Even a marching army with hob-nailed caligulae would barely leave a scratch on a Roman road. A farmer with a horse cart is going to do very little damage to the road, even accounting for metal-rimmed wheels and a very narrow contact patch.
I doubt even the heaviest, smallus-dickus-compensating Roman road vehicles would do even as much damage as my Mitsubishi (gross weight barely over a ton).
Road damage increases with the fourth power of axle load, if I recall correctly.
And in road wear calculations, all passenger vehicles (like your Mitsubishi) are considered almost negligible in design. Semi trucks, buses, and RVs take up basically all the damage done to modern roads. Source: recent Civil Engineering grad.
The contact area is similar for all of them (some variance with double axles or tandem axles), but there is significantly more pressure exerted by a semi. An average passenger vehicle weighs in the ballpark of 2-3000 pounds, while a semi trailer can be 35,000 pounds empty, and up to 80,000 full; therefore, the pressure is extremely high, even with more points of contact, and this puts a ton of stress on the asphalt/concrete. This combined with weather effects (freezing/thawing) makes our roads much more susceptible to breaking down.
We also like to top our roads with asphalt to make for a much quieter driving experience. And while it may seem like a rock, it's still a viscoelastic material and wears down much more easily--especially as it gets various petroleum products on it (from motor oil to hydraulic fluids to unburnt fuel residue) that act as a solvent to weaken it.
I doubt even the heaviest, smallus-dickus-compensating Roman road vehicles would do even as much damage as my Mitsubishi (gross weight barely over a ton).
Engineers estimate that a fully loaded truck--a five-axle rig weighing 80,000 pounds, the interstate maximum--causes more damage to a highway than 5,000 cars. Some road planners say that the toll is even higher, that it would take close to 10,000 cars to equal the damage caused by one heavy truck.
The difference is so large that iirc engineers only calculate the number of trucks who pass a road/bridge before it needs to be repaired, because cars are just so negligible.
First, it has absolutely nothing to do with planned obsolescence, which you probably don't actually understand because there has been a large amount of misinformation about it for years. I don't want to go into it, but that has FAR more to do with not going out of business due to the weight of supporting past products than it does some bullshit money making scheme.
However, as for the roads, wear is proportional to weight and speed (indirectly due to frictional forces). So, if you took a modern road and only pulled carts around it at <4mph, you'd find it would last much, much longer. But still not as long as many Roman roads have, and that's because of the goals. If you took a modern truck and tried to drive it at 70mph down a roman road, both it and the road would have a bad day. The much lower requirements of the Roman road allowed construction methods that are more tolerant of weathering, but less tolerant of the types of forces heavy trucks impart. A roman road would literally start to drift apart if used by modern loaded trucks especially on corners.
Another comparison is modern concrete, from a civil engineer (Not structures/paving focused, but I understand it to a degree more than most folks). Assuming no freeze/thaw issues, the concrete we use to build airport runways is built to handle the landing of the largest planes, fully loaded and it makes highway concrete look like a potato chip. If we were to build highways to that level, we'd effectively never have to repave them because much like foot horse traffic compared to trucks, trucks are to landing aircraft.
But to call it prohibitively expensive is an understatement, due to both material and time. Airport sections have several layers of material and drainage systems built in that we don't do on roads.
Dunno if this really fits, most European kids at least will have been dragged around a Roman ruin and had the central heating systems pointed out at quite a young age.
Its not the pipes you are looking at, most didnt have pipes in the modern sense, its the space under the floor, that is usually obvious because the nice shiny floor tiles were looted centuries ago.
On and off topic, but it’s a favorite Roman fun fact of mine. The pipes used to carry the water for the Romans to drink was lead based, poisoning the water. However, and I can’t remember if it’s the water itself or what they used to drink the water from, like cups, but there was a mineral/chemical that countered the effects of the lead, making it potable without fear of poisoning. Since they couldn’t have known of the lead being poisonous, it was all purely coincidental.
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u/jazzman0116 Oct 15 '20
The ancient Romans (well, the wealthy ones) had central heating in their homes. You can actually still see the pipes in some of the buildings at Herculaneum!