Sep 25 2011

What have the Romans ever done for us?

“All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us?”

How Stuff Works has a feature on “10 Cool Engineering Tricks the Romans Taught Us“

If you wanted someone to explain geometry, you asked a Greek. If you wanted someone to build you a floating bridge, a sewer network or a weapon that could fire flaming balls of gravel and tar 300 hundred yards (274 meters), you called a Roman. As much as the Greeks gave us, Rome’s brilliant architectural, organizational and engineering feats that make them stand out among the ancient peoples.

You can read about the ten top engineering tricks of the Romans here.