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Essay about Aqueducts: A Great Roman Achievement

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Roman aqueducts were very important to the ancient Romans and heavily influenced their daily life. The aqueducts brought wealth, power, and luxury to the people of Rome in more ways than imaginable and more than just for the obvious purpose of delivering water. When the wells and rainwater were no longer sufficient for the population of Rome, they had to develop a new method of bringing water into the city. Thus creating the invention of aqueducts.

Other than providing water for everyday purposes to homes and buildings, the aqueducts also served many other purposes. Aqueducts helped to eliminate polluted water, erosion control, irrigation systems, redirect wastewater (cloaca maxima), and provided hydropower for mills and mining. …show more content…

Roman aqueducts were built using many different techniques. The most common aquaduct was a masonry channel made from stone, brick, or cement. Romans also build them using lead pipes and terracotta/clay pipes. The types of aqueducts are: Open trenches, covered trenches (cut and cover most often used), tunnels, arcades (arches), walls, pressurized pipes or inverted siphons (found to be very difficult and inefficient). Approximately 80% of the aqueducts were underground. The cement used on some aqueducts were made from a special volcanic ingredient called pozzuolana helping them to be so durable that they are existing today. The lead pipes that were sometimes used, raised questions today about possible lead poisoning. However, this is dismissed due to the fact that the water was always flowing and the hard water caused a protective coating lining the inside of the pipes made of mineral deposits.

The principle idea of how they work is that they canal water from a source to the city via tunnels and arcade bridges. The primary way the aqueducts work is by the force of gravity. Often water sources (river or lake) is dammed to create an intake area. Or, to collect spring water, they used springhouses or catch basins to funnel water into the city. Upon reaching the city, the water flow was slowed down using Castellas (holding tanks), then was piped into local areas.

All being said,

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