When they were not too busy conquering distant lands, the Romans liked to dig. German hydromechanics professor Mathias Döring discovered that Roman engineers spent a century digging a 66-miles long underground aqueduct to bring water to modern day Syria:
The soldiers chiseled over 600,000 cubic meters of stone from the ground -- or the equivalent of one-quarter of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
"Over the first 60 kilometers, the tunnel has a gradient of 0.3 per thousand," explains the project director. That works out to 30 centimeters per kilometer -- an astonishingly shallow angle of descent.
Link - via britannica
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.
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In the movie "Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York City" [2008] they go into the NYC sewers and say "this is the longest underground aqueduct IN THE WORLD"... an example of how media tells lies that people just take for granted as being true. The NYC aqueduct is actually third or fourth largest!!
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Despite being a fascinating topic, I stopped reading when he editorialized that Romans wasted vast amounts of water. Romans had a system for waters and sewers unmatched until a couple of centuries ago. What's sad is that our modern world, with our knowledge of water conservation, manages to waste so much water. How dare we sneer at the Romans for their use of water!
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From time to time, me and my buddies still discuss the Romans. Where would we be or what would the world be like if Rome never fell?
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I'd have to say that in some ways they were more clever, since they had less of what we have, they had to make due with what they had bringing more inovative things to the table.
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amazing. i think we may find more and more evidence of clever ancients as time progresses
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