Concrete Vs Roman Concrete

Rome had lasted many years and provided many advances during that era, some of which were lost for centuries. Two important developments that Rome had made were concrete and the arch. Antony Kamm defined concrete on his website The Romans under the Art section as a mixture of clay and limestone heated to high temperature, then pulverized to powder at which mixed with water and sets as hard as rock. He later states that because of this invention, Rome was able to indulge their architectural ambitions. It is important to note that the Romans did not invent the arch, Kamm stats that “their development of it allowed them to exploit their penchant for resolving improbable situations”.

Paul Preuss wrote the article “Roman Seawater Concrete Holds the Secret to cutting Carbon Emissions” for the Berkeley Lab website, from this article we see several of the differences from our modern day Portland cement and the Ancient Roman Concrete. We learn that a major difference between the two is the life span in salt water, modern day Portland Cement was designed to last about 50 years, where the Roman Concrete was found in the Mediterranean Sea to have been submerged for the last 2,000 years by Paulo Monteiro. It is later discussed in the article that another key difference between the two types is the baking

The saving of materials allowed the Romans to be smart with building sound structures in the best possible way. The aqueduct carried water over great distances to supply water to the great city of Rome. The Arches helped distributing resource use for these aqueducts. From the website Wikipedia we learn on the Roman aqueduct page that these aqueduct would also be built with