What was the Romans Technology?

Answer 1

The Romans were first to fully appreciate the advantages of the arch, the vault and the dome. The arch has a strong lad bearing capacity and provides stability. The Etruscans invented the simple barrel arch and Pergamon invented the vault (adjacent arches which are assembled side by side) which has an even greater load bearing capacity and whose structure is also suited to support large roofs. The arches and the vaults came to be used extensively for the first time. They became essential for the construction of large scale buildings, to support large roofs and to build basements. They also used the arch to build gates, aqueducts, bridges which were much longer than before and could cross much wider rivers and valleys. They even managed to build a bridge across the lower Danube, which is a very wide river. If a deep valley had to be crossed, two or three piers of arches were built on top of each other to reach the desired height.

The Romans invented segmental arch as they realised that an arch did not have to be a semicircle.

The Romans developed a new and much stronger type of concrete which was as resistant as modern concrete and also set underwater (this enabled them to build much bigger docks for ports). However, it was not as fluid as modern concrete and had to be layered by hand. The arch, the vault and concrete were what made the construction of such a massive structure as the Colosseum possible. Concrete was also used to build domes, public buildings, military facilities (forts and fortifications) warehouses, amphitheatres, circuses (racing tracks) temples and baths. Often the Romans used a mixture of stone, brick and concrete (for the Colosseum stone and concrete were used).

The Romans perfected the dome. The Pantheon (a temple which has been turned into a church) in Rome is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.

The Romans built great aqueducts. Most were underground conduits. When above ground the conduits were on bridges when the aqueducts had to cross a valley or when they were needed to keep a gradient to make the water moving. The Pont du Gard, mentioned above, was a bridge for an aqueduct which supplied Nines, in southern France. When the valleys were too steep, a system of siphons was used. The siphons took the water to tanks lower down which fed other conduits.

The Romans invented the stone-paves roads. The network of these roads reached 80,500 kilometres (50,313 miles) which was 20% of the network of 400,000 kilometres (250,000 miles) of roads in the Roman Empire.

The Romans invented the amphitheatre, which was an arena for the gladiatorial games. They took the Greek idea of theatres with semi-circular seating and they extended it to a full circle or, more usually an elliptic shape. The Colosseum and the arena of Verona are the two most famous amphitheatre.

The Romans adopted the cranes of the Greeks and massively improved on them. The simplest one was the trispastos, which had of a single-beam, a winch, a rope, and a block with three pulleys. It had had a mechanical advantage of 3:1, and single man operating the winch could raise 150 kg. The pentaspastos had five pulleys and the polyspastos had a set of three by five pulleys with two, three or four masts. The latter was worked by four men at both sides of the winch and could lift 3,000 kg. When the winch was replaced by a treadwheel, the load could be doubled to 6,000 kg with only half the crew, because the treadwheel had a larger diameter and thus a much bigger mechanical advantage.

The Romans improved on the ballista was a weapon which launched a large projectile at a distant target using two levers with torsion springs. The springs consisted of several loops of twisted ropes. The Manuballista was a handheld version of the traditional Ballista. The Carroballista was a cart-mounted version. The ancient sources said that the Romans developed the polybolos, a repeating' ballista' which shot 11 shots a minute. This was at least four times the rate of an ordinary ballista. However, none has been found by archaeologists.

The Romans invented the hypocaust, which was an underfloor heating system for heating houses and the baths using hot air. The floor was raised above the ground by pillars which left a space inside that was filled with hot air from a furnace. The heat from the underfloor heated the air in the room. Passages boxed by ceramic tiles were put inside the walls to move the air to flues on the roof and to heat the walls.

The greatest example of multi-pier bridges is the Pont du Gard, a bridge with three tiers of recessed arches with the main piers in line one above the other. The first two tiers have very high and wide arches and a third tier has low and narrow arches. It reaches a height of 48.8 metres (160 feet). The lower tier is 142 metres (466 feet) long and has six aches with a height of 22metres (72 ft.). The second tier is 242 metres (794 ft.) long and has eleven arches 20 metres (66 ft.) high. The upper tier is 275 metre (902 ft.) long. It originally had 47 arches (only 35 have survived) 7 metres (23 ft.) high. The width of the first pier is 6 metres (20th.), that of the second pier is 4 metres (13 ft.) and that of the third pier is 3 metres (23 ft.).