Indoor plumbing

"HammerheadFistpunch" (hammerheadfistpunch) 01/24/2020 at 18:25 • Filed to: history

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Here me out. This is no ordinary brass ball valve. It’s nearly 2000 years old and was encased in volcanic ash for most of that time. Neat.

Visited the Pompeii exhibit today. Some ingesting stuff like how advanced their metal working was including boilers and underfloor heating. Some interesting stuff like how much they liked porno and hookers (A lot, it turns out) and some kinda sad like the hallow cavities of bodies frozen in time like this doggo who’s cast was made from such a void.

They also had casts of infants, children and adults but I decided against pictures of those. You could see facial expressions and... Yeah no.

Overall very interesting

For Sweden > HammerheadFistpunch 01/24/2020 at 18:36

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If they were so advanced at plumbing why couldn’t they stop the mountain from leaking?

HammerheadFistpunch > For Sweden 01/24/2020 at 18:37

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Too busy with hookers

Noodles > HammerheadFistpunch 01/24/2020 at 18:40

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That's funny. Hahaha.

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > HammerheadFistpunch 01/24/2020 at 18:40

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I love the Roman era stuff— especially the mundane. Some of those houses actually had mosaics that translated to “Beware of Dog”. The amphitheatre museum near Antalya has a few of the original “ticket tokens” from the Roman e ra - and there, clearly engraved on the back, is the Row and Seat number the assigned seat.  I guess the ushers helped you find your seat back in the Roman reign, too.

It’s obvious, maybe, but we think we’re so advanced, yet the Romans had a lot of the same “solutions” to day-to-day domestic challenges. And, yeah, Beware of The Dog...

Svend > HammerheadFistpunch 01/24/2020 at 18:44

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The crazy thing for me, was they were actually rebuilding from the previous eruption. 

Boxer_4 > HammerheadFistpunch 01/24/2020 at 18:48

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That valve is really cool!

ranwhenparked > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 01/24/2020 at 19:22

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And there were businessmen who owned thermopolia in different cities, effectively fast food chains.

feather-throttle-not-hair > HammerheadFistpunch 01/24/2020 at 19:22

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Jeez. Seeing that level of preservation makes really makes you realize how unthoughtful those ancients were. Like...is it really too much trouble to ask to encase just a few more things in hot ash? Maybe some dope ass swords? The lighthouse at alexandria? Colossus? Like...literally any of Archi medes’ war machines....?

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > ranwhenparked 01/24/2020 at 19:46

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Thar’s a great example!

facw > feather-throttle-not-hair 01/24/2020 at 20:09

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We have some of the Antikythera Mechanism:

It’s a bit hard to see through the corrosion but it’s an incredibly complex device:

The most complicated bit of machinery in existence for ~1500 years as far as we know (this one was lost two millennia , so it wouldn’t be shocking for there to be other similar devices, but probably not too many, of the knowledge to build them wouldn’t have been lost in antiquity) .

HammerheadFistpunch > Boxer_4 01/24/2020 at 20:20

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It felt a little wired that the valve was my highlight

ranwhenparked > facw 01/24/2020 at 20:35

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The ancient Greeks also had steam engines, but they apparently just considered them entertaining curiosities and didn’t put them to any practical use. 

shop-teacher > HammerheadFistpunch 01/24/2020 at 22:35

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Around here, it makes sense to all of us weirdos. I would have been the most interested in that too.

feather-throttle-not-hair > facw 01/25/2020 at 00:02

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okay thats fuckin rad.

KnowsAboutCars > HammerheadFistpunch 01/25/2020 at 07:51

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That’s really cool. I’m into ancient Rome and Greece but hadn’t even thought about how advanced they were in metallurgy, particularly with this sort of everyday applications.