
Ancient Roman Valves (2013) - Jerry2
https://www.valvemagazine.com/web-only/categories/manufacturing/4947-ancient-roman-valves.html
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jakedata
The sophistication of Roman plumbing technology is not that surprising.

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

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rootbear
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".

~~~
usrusr
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!)

~~~
notfromhere
Specialty industry magazines are way better targeting than google. Their value
also shot up post-GDPR as publishers realized how valuable their subscriber
lists were to vendors.

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Jerry2
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](https://i.imgur.com/gX26IYG.jpg)

I found it to be absolutely amazing so I had to find out more about it.

~~~
CamperBob2
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.

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

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jacobush
Still, a stationary power plant would have eminently doable in my not so
humble opinion. Even stone for cylinder offers great compression strength.
Make it big enough and the scale works out to your advantage. Bronze bearings
could be made very durable.

~~~
AstralStorm
The reason is simple - Romans tended to use wood as fuel source. Steam engines
started way after we decided to use coal instead.

The wood heat is too low to get high pressure saturated steam, and lower
pressure is not that useful and requires a huge boiler or specially prepared
wood briquettes.

Metallurgically, Romans knew of brass and copper, which is enough for a decent
steam boiler. It would be rather expensive to make.

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Animats
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.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
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
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.

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ip26
Supposedly horse traces were also much more expensive to make & maintain
compared to an ox yoke.

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elric
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.

~~~
jascii
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.

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

~~~
dekhn
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.

~~~
quickthrowman
Yep, if you survived childhood, you’d likely live long enough to see grandkids
and ‘retire’ in Rome. In addition, a Roman army field medic/surgeon from the
late republic/early empire onward was probably just as effective as any
medic/doctor anywhere until the 19th century. Amputations, suturing
lacerations, and so on didn’t really change at all until antiseptics and
antibiotics.

It’s crazy to think how medicine didn’t really advance for ~2000 years, and
then vaccinations, antiseptics, and anesthesia (and later antibiotics) came
into use and medicine advanced rapidly. Oh, add in a dash of germ theory and
the scientific method, and stir. The Romans were really quite amazing!

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

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peter303
In many aspects ancient Roman technology was not superseded until the 1800s.
1500 years of unnecessary inferiority.

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

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

[https://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/egypt/articles/hrd...](https://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/egypt/articles/hrdfact3.php)

~~~
alanbernstein
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.

