Greater than a millennium and a half after its fall, we nonetheless look again with marvel on the accomplishments of the traditional Roman Empire. Few parts of its legacy impress us as a lot as its constructed surroundings — or in any case, what’s left of its constructed surroundings. Nonetheless, the truth that something stays at all the constructions constructed by the Romans tells us that they have been doing one thing proper: particularly, they have been doing concrete proper. Simply how they made that astonishingly sturdy constructing materials has been a topic of analysis even in recent times, and we even featured it right here on Open Tradition again in 2017. However may we make Roman concrete at the moment?
Such is the duty of Shawn Kelly, host of the Youtube channel Corporal’s Nook, in the video above. Utilizing supplies like volcanic ash, pumice and limestone, he makes a brick that appears greater than strong sufficient to go up in opposition to any trendy concrete.
As of this writing, this easy video has racked up greater than three million views, a quantity that displays our enduring fascination with the query of how the traditional Romans created their world — in addition to the query addressed within the higher-tech Sensible Engineering video beneath, “Was Roman Concrete Higher?”
The actual fact of the matter is that, regardless of possessing applied sciences the Romans may hardly have imagined, their concrete lasts longer than ours. Why that needs to be the case comes down, largely, to water: we put a fantastic deal extra of it into our concrete than the Romans did, in an effort to pour it extra cheaply and simply. However this makes it extra fragile and topic to deterioration over time (as seen within the early dilapidation of sure Brutalist buildings), even regardless of our use of chemical components and metal reinforcement. Romans concrete was additionally blended with seawater, which precipitated the formation of crystals inside the materials that really strengthened it because it aged — thus cementing, as one wag within the feedback places it, the Romans’ place in historical past.
Associated content material:
The Roman Roads and Bridges You Can Nonetheless Journey As we speak
Roman Structure: A Free Course from Yale
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His tasks embody the Substack e-newsletter Books on Cities, the guide The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cinema. Observe him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.