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TIL Roman concrete wasn't just lime and volcanic ash like I always thought
I was walking through the Baths of Caracalla in Rome last month and noticed the walls had these little white chunks that looked like they didn't belong. Turns out they used quicklime mixed in hot, which made the concrete self-healing when cracks formed. Has anyone else noticed weird details like that on ancient sites?
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rubyk861mo ago
Read somewhere that roman concrete got stronger over time because seawater actually made the crystals grow bigger.
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nancy_ross1mo ago
The Romans were definitely clever with concrete, but people get way too carried away with the "seawater makes it stronger" thing. It's more like the seawater triggered a specific chemical reaction that kept the concrete from falling apart, not that it actually kept getting stronger forever. Comparing it to a garage door sensor that resets itself is a bit of a stretch too. Those are just simple feedback loops that engineers have been putting into machines for decades, it's not some deep universal truth the Romans discovered.
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andrew_rodriguez1mo ago
...and it's wild how that same idea shows up in the weirdest places now. Like I read about Roman concrete fixing its own cracks and it hit me that stuff sorting itself out is actually super common. My garage door opener has this little sensor that recalibrates if it gets stuck, my phone updates itself overnight, even the thermostat at work resets the temperature when nobody's there. It's like everything around us is trying to be self-healing now, just slower and with more software updates. Makes you wonder if the romans were onto something way bigger than just buildings, like maybe they saw how nature always finds a way to patch itself up and just copied it.
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