
Ancient Romans Used Molten Iron to Repair Streets Before Vesuvius Erupted - gus_massa
https://www.livescience.com/65479-ancient-romans-used-molten-iron-street-repair.html
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rini17
The joy of not having any infrastructure buried under the streets:

"Investigations at Pompeii have shown that particularly high volumes of
traffic concentrated in narrow streets could wear down even a stone-paved
surface in only a few decades,"

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WJW
"A few decades"

I bet there are not all that many streets in the western world which have been
around at all for more than a decade.

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Rebelgecko
Probably more than you expect— here in Los Angeles (not a particularly old
city), there's hundreds of asphalt streets that haven't been repaved since the
1930s and 1940s while they've been trapped in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic hell
(the city disowned the streets for liability purposes). There's even a short
stone street in Pasadena that dates back to 1900 or so. I don't think it's
been entirely redone at any point, although you can tell where some of the
granite chunks have been replaced.

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toasterlovin
Don’t forget all the concrete streets in LA! All the streets before a certain
vintage were paved with concrete and are mostly intact where they haven’t been
covered with asphalt.

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sand500
Any reason I can't fill the potholes near me with molten iron other than the
city will get mad at me?

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pasabagi
Asphalt burns surprisingly easily. So, it would probably ignite, then you
would have horrible yellow sulfurous smoke going everywhere.

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exabrial
I'm actually surprised it wasn't lead given the difficulty of melting iron.

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ncmncm
This is _so_ hard-core. I love it.

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microtherion
Surely you meant to say "This is so METAL"…

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ncmncm
Surely.

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londons_explore
They don't show any large patch filling a rut.

Also, molten iron would have presumably been expensive back then - too
expensive to simply pave a large part of the street with.

I don't really see evidence this was street repair as much as "occasionally on
the roughest roads some drips of molten iron fell off the back of carts while
being transported"

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codedokode
But why would someone need to carry molten iron? It is inconvenient and
dangerous.

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andrewflnr
I'm pretty sure no one moves large amounts of molten iron today. With ancient
technology it would have been impractical even if they wanted to, maybe
impossible.

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WJW
Have you seen [https://www.quora.com/Why-is-molten-aluminum-transported-
by-...](https://www.quora.com/Why-is-molten-aluminum-transported-by-semi-
truck-on-public-roads)? They routinely ship entire trucks full of the stuff
from foundries to forges over public highways.

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jbay808
The melting point of aluminum: 660°C

The melting point of iron: 1535°C

It's also much heavier. There aren't even many suitable container materials to
store it, let alone ship it safely.

