[HN Gopher] Reconstructing Roman Industrial Engineering
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Reconstructing Roman Industrial Engineering
Author : samizdis
Score : 66 points
Date : 2021-07-08 11:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| hef19898 wrote:
| Well, being an industrial engineer myself, I was always at awe
| looking at Roman engineering. And ancient Greek and Macedonian
| engineering as well. Especially compared to medieval Europe,
| those empires were much more modern in terms of standards and so
| on. Medieval engineering was top notch, especially architecture
| (gothic churches and cathedrals really stand out), but at that
| large a scale.
|
| IMHO the Roman Empire was build on the back of its civil
| engineers, and not its legions. At least in the long run.
| iSnow wrote:
| >IMHO the Roman Empire was build on the back of its civil
| engineers, and not its legions. At least in the long run.
|
| Interesting thought but why would the Empire have fallen then?
| Most likely, civil engineering remained top notch throughout.
| wavefunction wrote:
| In early Imperial Rome prestigious families would fund public
| works as a public symbol of their wealth and power. This
| shifted over time to a more self-interested display of wealth
| and power in the family's villas. If the aqueducts and roads
| have existed for centuries in your region there is less
| opportunity for those public displays of civil engineering
| and I would suspect the skills and knowledge did wither
| though I can't say to what extent. Look how fast the
| knowledge to build the space-race era rockets was lost in the
| US, and that's with modern record keeping and no major
| domestic disasters or upheavals.
| bpiche wrote:
| The empire never ended
| jjk166 wrote:
| Building roads and sewers and such in a new province is a
| great way to secure the new people's loyalty. But after the
| bridge you built has stood for 400 years, people start to ask
| "but what have the Romans done for me lately?"
| monocasa wrote:
| "What have the Romans ever done for us?"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
| InitialLastName wrote:
| As we're seeing with infrastructure now in the US, civil
| engineering isn't a "do once" kind of job. Infrastructure
| (roads, bridges, irrigation etc) takes consistent upkeep,
| resources, and redesign as the fixtures degrade and usage
| patterns change. Engineers still need resources, manpower and
| direction, so as the empire's control area and wealth
| centralization receded, so did the impetus/capacity to
| maintain infrastructure.
| sgift wrote:
| > IMHO the Roman Empire was build on the back of its civil
| engineers, and not its legions. At least in the long run.
|
| An interesting aspect of this is that the legions _were_ civil
| engineers. Every legion had craftsman as part of their
| workforce. The craftsman didn 't build only their forts, but
| also streets, bridges, mills ... I think this combination may
| have been Romes greatest advantage. Not only were they able to
| conquer regions, but also to build them out pretty fast after
| the fact.
| OJFord wrote:
| Is that so different from the (British Army's) Royal
| Engineers and similar units in modern armies really?
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Military engineers focus on battlefield-relevant
| construction and demolition techniques and aren't routinely
| deployed on civilian engineering tasks during their
| readiness cycle. One exception would be military assistance
| in emergency situations, such as quickly erecting a bridge
| to replace a flood-damaged one. For the average soldier,
| their trade-specific training would be measured in months,
| so the only opportunities to pick up deep domain knowledge
| are limited. Career engineers might get deeper knowledge
| but I suspect they would still focus on battlefield-
| specific competencies.
| rjsw wrote:
| A Royal Engineer friend of mine is an expert on runways,
| both making and breaking them.
| nwatson wrote:
| In the USA the US Army Corp of Engineers is heavily
| involved in public/civilian infrastructure. For example,
| see this article on their involvement and attendant
| controversy in Hurricane Katrina (2000s New Orleans): htt
| ps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers
| ...
| OJFord wrote:
| I won't comment on training because I suspect that varies
| too much internationally to be worthwhile - but of course
| they focus on battlefield-relevant tasks; are you saying
| that wasn't also true of the Romans? I don't know, I just
| assumed (and asked if) they were pretty similar.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| The difference is that Roman soldiers could build roads
| and fortified camps as part of their day job using skills
| similar to civilian Roman construction. Today, however,
| building a modern motorway, or a high rise building,
| would be way different to battlefield engineering.
| hef19898 wrote:
| The advantage the Romans had was, that military
| engineering and civil engineering were much closer back
| then.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The Egyptian army was also used in construction projects. I
| believe the general thinking is that the state wanted to have
| a military force available, but didn't want it to be idle.
| That reasoning would predict that every standing military
| would see similar uses.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _"What it shows is that, also in antiquity, people were
| creative. They had a problem, and they had to find a creative
| solution."_
|
| "Creativity" isn't a modern invention. "I have a problem to solve
| and will use engineering!" isn't a modern invention.
|
| They've existed since the beginning of humans, and it remains
| quite irritating to see people who are shocked and amazed that
| ancient people were able to solve problems - often in ways we
| don't fully understand. How long was Roman cement a mystery?
|
| Human nature doesn't change with time, and while the things that
| people groups care about tends to change, it baffles me that
| someone studying ancient Roman ruins of what's pretty clearly an
| industrial facility sounds surprised that they did something less
| than the most obvious solution - especially when it worked
| better.
|
| Wasn't like you had Twitter to distract you - engineering
| solutions to problems is very clearly something the Romans were
| good at, given how much of their infrastructure rather outlasted
| the nation.
|
| Modern civilization isn't what it is because we're somehow
| smarter or more creative than people were 1500 or 2000 years ago
| - it is what it is because, about 300 years ago, we finally
| figured out how to make fossil fuels do something mechanically
| useful for us.
|
| If the Romans had figured out a steam engine, and had cared to
| continue developing it (a technology without an application is
| just a curiosity, and history is littered with those), they
| certainly could have accomplished plenty of what we consider
| modern today.
| barney54 wrote:
| The Nature article this is based on is helpful to read because of
| the pictures:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-74900-5#Fig1
| geebee wrote:
| I have to admit I was eager to read this because of the phrase
| "Industrial Engineering." Still an interesting article, and there
| is some discussion of components working together as a system...
| but overall, I think we're still talking about a somewhat
| mechanical innovation in aqueducts. I think it's probably more
| accurate to classify this one under civil engineering.
| Interesting and fun to read, but consistent with what most people
| already know about the Romans - they had remarkable large scale
| civil engineering projects.
|
| I don't want to drag this discussion into the minutiae of what
| distinguishes civil from mechanical from industrial engineering,
| especially since there's so much overlap (I met a lot of civil
| engineers in my graduate industrial engineering classes,
| especially from transportation engineering). But what I'm reading
| here doesn't really strike me as something that would be notably
| "industrial engineering," which I see as more abstracted from
| impressive mechanical innovations in infrastructure projects like
| aqueducts.
| tiahura wrote:
| Can anyone suggest a resource to learn how to distinguish the
| various types of construction by civilization found around the
| Med? For example you come across the foundation of an ancient
| building in Greece. It could be Mycenaean, Classical,
| Hellenistic, or Roman, but to my eye they all look like stone and
| mortar.
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