Ancient Roman Technology... Today

[*Michelle*]

I found this fascinating.

 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/08/25/these-two-ancient-roman-techs-could-disrupt-modern-industry/

 

 

Recently, there have been two recent engineering discoveries from Ancient Rome that have the potential to shake up some major areas of industry – discoveries that show we still have a lot to learn from our ancestors.

 

The first finding is rather astonishing. As noted earlier this month by Zeeya Merali, a 1,600 year old chalice known as the Lycurgus Cup have proved to be more than just a stunning work of art. It’s also an example of one of the earliest forms of nanotechnology.

 

...

 

But the Ancient Romans aren’t content to only revolutionize medicine. Soon, you may be living or working on a building or road that’s built with the same materials that the Romans built their own with – materials that, when created, also produce fewer carbon emissions.

 

That’s thanks to the work of a research team at the University of California at Berkeley, which has studied the ways that Roman concrete has managed to endure for over 2,000 years in the same conditions that cause modern concrete to degrade after about 50 years.

 

 

[theYoungerMrsWarde]

That is super cool; thanks for sharing!

 

[*Michelle*]

The cup really blew me away.  I'd never heard of it before. How could I have never heard of a 1600 year-old color-changing cup? :laugh:

[trulycrabby]

Extremely fascinating!

[fraidycat]

Very intriguing!

[Ravin]

I wonder if they tested to see if poisons commonly used in the period or alcohol changed the cup's color.

 

The big reason the modern technological era took so long to take off wasn't that people didn't figure out very sophisticated engineering methods. It's that they treated them as trade secrets, and no one dealt in information as commerce let alone for the good of all. There was nothing like patent law, so innovation was jealously guarded as sacred or private knowledge, often not written down, and lost when artisans and engineers died without passing down the knowledge. There also wasn't systematic inquiry into why something worked as we have with the modern scientific method.