Post by Dave Homewood on Apr 16, 2012 23:38:45 GMT 12
This evening I saw a programme on TVNZ7 called 'What The Ancients Did For Us', in which the presenters were talking about Roman engineering and inventions.
I have watched a fair bit of that sort of thing in the past in shows like Time Team and Meet The Ancestors (back when they played those shows on Prime), but this show today had some startling things I'd not known before.
Evidence shows that the Romans had constructed mechanical saws run by flowing water on a waterwheel that could cut up to four veneers of marble rock at a time, saving on a lot of manual sawing and also making them more even sheets.
Apparently Rome had half a million inhabitants in the height of the Roman Empire and the Romans lived priarily on bread as a staple diet. No-one cooked bread at home but big bakeries supplieeveryone. In these bakeries they had food mixers that kneaded the dough on a large scale, powered by donkeys.
The most startling thing was the Emporer Caligular (sp?) commissioned a couple of massive boats, I mean virtually the size of a battleship, but they were not warships, they were probably the first ever luxury yachts. Onboard they had dining halls, temples, heated baths, and all sorts of luxuries. For many centuries the rumours of these were thought to be fable till Benito Mussolini took power and in 1928 he commissioned an expedition to investigate rumours of ancient Roman ships at the bottom of a lake in Italy. They found the hulls of two of these massive ships. They were all wood construction and were found to be massively ahead of their time. Mussolini had a purpose built museum erected for them and they hauled them up to become very popular tourist attractions.
However in 1944 the Nazis while retreating saw fit to torch the museum, and thought the marble building survived, most of the relics of the ships were birned. Only a little bit of the original ships remains now, sadly. Plus the museum has some smaller scale replicas based on photos (they are big in themselves).
There was a lot of technology found on these ships that startled science and archeologists, including that they had ducts for pumping heated water and air around the vessels, and amazingly the discovery that the Romans actually had ball bearings! It had been thought for centuries that Leonardo de Vinci had invented the ball bearing but not so.
The show also explained the viaduct system and how the Roamns used these to keep their cities and towns in water. I didn't know that the Trivoli Fountain in Rome is fed by an ancient Roman viaduct even now, not a modern pump.
Amazing show. And it's incredible how advanced the Romans were. How the world slipped into a Dark Age after the Romans had done so much for the world I do not know.
I have watched a fair bit of that sort of thing in the past in shows like Time Team and Meet The Ancestors (back when they played those shows on Prime), but this show today had some startling things I'd not known before.
Evidence shows that the Romans had constructed mechanical saws run by flowing water on a waterwheel that could cut up to four veneers of marble rock at a time, saving on a lot of manual sawing and also making them more even sheets.
Apparently Rome had half a million inhabitants in the height of the Roman Empire and the Romans lived priarily on bread as a staple diet. No-one cooked bread at home but big bakeries supplieeveryone. In these bakeries they had food mixers that kneaded the dough on a large scale, powered by donkeys.
The most startling thing was the Emporer Caligular (sp?) commissioned a couple of massive boats, I mean virtually the size of a battleship, but they were not warships, they were probably the first ever luxury yachts. Onboard they had dining halls, temples, heated baths, and all sorts of luxuries. For many centuries the rumours of these were thought to be fable till Benito Mussolini took power and in 1928 he commissioned an expedition to investigate rumours of ancient Roman ships at the bottom of a lake in Italy. They found the hulls of two of these massive ships. They were all wood construction and were found to be massively ahead of their time. Mussolini had a purpose built museum erected for them and they hauled them up to become very popular tourist attractions.
However in 1944 the Nazis while retreating saw fit to torch the museum, and thought the marble building survived, most of the relics of the ships were birned. Only a little bit of the original ships remains now, sadly. Plus the museum has some smaller scale replicas based on photos (they are big in themselves).
There was a lot of technology found on these ships that startled science and archeologists, including that they had ducts for pumping heated water and air around the vessels, and amazingly the discovery that the Romans actually had ball bearings! It had been thought for centuries that Leonardo de Vinci had invented the ball bearing but not so.
The show also explained the viaduct system and how the Roamns used these to keep their cities and towns in water. I didn't know that the Trivoli Fountain in Rome is fed by an ancient Roman viaduct even now, not a modern pump.
Amazing show. And it's incredible how advanced the Romans were. How the world slipped into a Dark Age after the Romans had done so much for the world I do not know.
