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Got into a rabbit hole about Roman concrete last night and it made me mad
I was reading this article from a university site about how Roman concrete actually gets stronger over time when exposed to seawater. Meanwhile modern concrete starts cracking after like 30 years. The Romans were mixing in volcanic ash and lime from the town of Pozzuoli and that stuff held together for 2000 years while our stuff falls apart in a few decades. How do we lose that knowledge and then call ourselves advanced? Anyone else just annoyed by how much ancient tech we can't even match today?
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oscarc121mo ago
The Pozzuoli ash thing blew my mind too, I used to think Roman engineering was overhyped.
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thomas_torres1mo ago
The Pantheon's dome actually holds the record for the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, and that's been standing for almost 2,000 years. I get why you'd think it's overhyped at first, but when you look at stuff like the aqueducts bringing water across miles of uneven terrain, it's hard to call that hype. @oscarc12, have you seen the Segovia aqueduct in Spain still standing without any mortar? That's just gravity and precise cutting doing the work. Roman concrete formulas were genuinely lost for centuries after the empire fell, too. They were mixing recipes that could set underwater and hold up against saltwater better than most modern stuff until the 1900s.
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cole_baker1mo ago
Wait, they were mixing concrete that could actually set underwater and last longer than modern stuff until the 1900s? @thomas_torres I need a source on that because that's straight up insane if true lol.
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