Historic Replicas

While I was researching Latin and the Roman contributions to Romance languages, I turned up a huge amount of information about Roman technology and inventions.  As it turns out, the Romans were responsible for an incredible number of scientific discoveries and techniques.  Some are very well known; the Romans are famous for their Roman costumes, the Coliseum (the ancient stadium of the gladiators that still stands in present-day Rome), their aqueducts, and architecture in general.  The segmented Roman armor of the centurions has been made famous in movies like I am Spartacus and Julius Caesar.  Other Roman technology may surprise you, though.  They used lighthouses to guide their ships, one of which stands to this day, the Tower of Hercules in Spain.  They mastered glassblowing and produced windows, lamps, even mirrors. Roman doctors used a wide variety of surgical tools, and some citizens wore false teeth made of iron.  Businessmen and mathematicians carried a portable abacus, in effect the world’s first pocket calculator, and many people had portable sundials, the world’s first pocket watches.  They even had indoor plumbing!  During a chapter of human history that’s often associated with disease and unsanitary living conditions, the Romans were using public baths and flush toilets.  How’s that for being ahead of your time?  Of course, the fall of the Roman Empire hit the reset button on human understanding; many of the secrets of Roman technology were lost and had to be rediscovered by later civilizations.  But when you consider how organized and sophisticated Rome was, it’s mind-boggling to think what they would have achieved if the empire had survived into modern times.