Category: Science/Technology

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V is for Valve

Ancient Roman bronze valve, from Valve magazine. Photo credit: Ministry for Better Cultural Activities — Superintendent for Archaeological Good of Naples and Pompeii

Indoor plumbing doesn’t get enough credit. We take it for granted, but one night spent camping is always enough for me to write fan letters to my en suite bathroom at home. In fact, plumbing as a whole doesn’t get enough credit. Prehistorians love to wax lyrical about the plow or cave paintings or Platonic ideals. They should be talking about irrigation. After all, find a sizeable population in history, and you’ll probably find a valve.

The Romans kind of cornered the historical air time on valves since they were the gold standard (Bronze standard? it’s the Bronze Age…) for plumbing as well as central heating. Numerous articles cover this in Valve magazine, and yes, there’s a magazine dedicated to valves. However, while we should give the Romans their due, the Egyptians were the first to use valves in irrigation, the Indus Valley builders of the largest public baths, the Mesopotamians creators of one fabulous desert garden after another, and the Incans masters of harnessing gravity to create waterfalls and canals.

Harnessing the power of water was one of humanity’s first ways of controlling their environment. The valve was an integral part of the story, such a simple little thing but very powerful. The best inventions are. Let’s consider:

  1. What is a valve?
  2. When and where were valves first introduced in ancient civilizations?
  3. What does the creation of the valve and the control of water imply about human thinking?
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T is for Trepanation

From Switzerland, @3500 BCE, Bronza Age. A woman’s skull had been drilled, and she had survived for some time afterward. Photo by Rama.

I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in
And stops my mind from wandering
Where it will go
I’m filling the cracks that ran through the door
And kept my mind from wandering
Where it will go

“Fixing a Hole,” McCartney/Lennon.

Archaeology was a pretty new discipline in the 18th and 19th century, so perhaps we can forgive the excavators who kept finding skulls with holes and tossing them aside. Oh, there’s another that’s been bashed in the head, poor bugger. Communication was a lot slower in, say, 1820, so they didn’t all talk to each other. They didn’t have a chat room where they could all post examples of what they’d found, to suddenly realize that Geez!, there were hundreds of these, and all over the world: Russia, China, Germany, France–especially France–Egypt, Greece, Peru–most especially Peru!

The key advance, if you will, came in 1867 in the Andes, when an artifact collector in South America named George Squiers wrote to an eminent French brain expert named Paul Broca. The rest is trepanation history. Because it turns out that 10,000 years ago, brain surgery was practiced, and it was practiced nearly everywhere.

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R is for Rubber

Aztec ballplayers playing “hip ball” in a typical state of undress, as depicted by Christopher Weiditz (1528) in a book on Mesoamerican customs.

Rubber isn’t an Ancient Invention, is it? Wasn’t rubber invented by Charles Goodrich (or was it Goodyear?) Or the Michelin Man? Historians seem to think so. A 2021 textbook on material culture history starts: “Rubber began its global bouncing career in the late 15th century.” Another says : “Columbus discovered rubber!” (Columbus discovered a prison cell is what Columbus discovered. ) Or: “Goodyear invented vulcanized rubber!” (Goodyear.com seems to think so.)

Some encyclopedias rightly credit the Mesoamerican cultures with discovering the properties of rubber, though usually they get two sentences, while Anglo-Europeans like Joseph Priestley, Charles Condamine, and Goodyear get several paragraphs. Let’s be clear. The Olmecs , Mayans, and Aztecs, starting as far back as 1600 BCE, cultivated and used rubber. They understand how to use it, what to use it for, and how to improve it. They were proficient with polymer chemistry–vulcanization–to extend its functionality They also invented sports in ways that would seem eerily familiar to us.

Given that we use rubber every darned day, I thought the Mesoamericans deserved a little more credit than always being the fifth oh, and... culture that I include. I thought they deserved their own post.

This post, therefore, deserves its own three questions:

  1. What are the origins of Rubber?
  2. How did the ancient civilizations with access to Rubber use it?
  3. How are these early practices echoed in modern-day Rubber use?
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