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We are surrounded by extraordinary feats of engineering. Constantly pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Without engineering, there'd be no modern world. Gigantic cities, amazing infrastructure, and ingenious inventions. Engineering is the key to turn dreams into reality. To reach these dizzying heights, today's technology relies on breakthroughs made by ancient engineers. It's mindboggling how they did this. How did early civilizations build on such a scale? They raised the bar for construction in a way that no one thought possible. The sheer engineering ability that is in itself impressive. By
defying the known laws of physics and daring to dream big, they constructed wonders of the world from gigantic pyramids to awe inspiring temples and mighty fortresses. All with the simplest of tools. Cannot imagine the skills people will have needed to build like this. Now it's possible to unear the secrets of the first engineers. They managed to construct edipuses that have survived the ravages of time and reveal how their genius laid the foundations for everything we build today.
Water a matter of life or death. Water is the one thing none of us can do without. Without water, nothing would be possible. We can't survive more than about 3 days without it. A modern city like New York consumes over 1 billion gallons of water every single day. Keeping the taps on, ensuring a constant flow of clean, safe water has been one of the greatest engineering challenges. When you turn on a tap, it's so easy to forget the immensely complex engineering which makes that fresh water possible.
Engineers have built vast underground tunnels, diverted rivers, constructed mighty dams. The careful balance struck between the forces of nature and the engineering required to build a dam is pretty astounding. Giant infrastructure dominating the landscape. Huge pumping stations, aqueducts defying gravity to carry water hundreds of miles, machinery to turn salt water into fresh, and incredible irrigation systems bringing aid deserts to life. Despite all this innovation, the world still faces a water shortage. Population growth, agriculture and industry drive everinccreasing demand for this priceless resource.
There's more than 2 billion people who don't have enough water at the moment. This problem is only going to increase. Water will continue to be a scarce and precious resource. Thousands of years ago, a smaller global population meant finding water sources wasn't usually such a problem. But developing ways to control and transport water would require a great leap in human ingenuity. So, how did ancient engineers invent the technology that led to the birth of agriculture and allowed ancient empires to expand? For early civilizations, the simplest way to obtain water was to build close to it.
Throughout history, settlements have tended to be by rivers simply because it means you've got water easily accessible, but also it's likely that the land next to the river is going to be capable of cultivation. But as settlements developed, living beside water wasn't always an option. New technology was needed. In the 7th century BC, the ancient Greeks were one of the first to tackle the problem by building large civic water systems. One of Greece's main maritime hubs was on the wealthy island of Samos. And Samos had a problem, a bone dry climate. One thing that his population were really lacking was access to clean, safe freshwater.
According to legend, engineers were tasked with bringing water to the island's main port city of Tigani. Their basic problem was the nearest source of fresh water lay miles away over a mountain. An architect and engineer called Upupellinus was commissioned to get the job done. Using simple measuring equipment and complex mathematics, he came up with an amazing engineering plan, something never previously attempted. He decided that he needed to go through the mountain, bore a tunnel that would go underneath all that rock. It would mean digging for just over half a mile through solid rock.
The idea was to excavate simultaneously from both sides of the mountain. Building a tunnel from either end is an incredible technological challenge. But ensuring both sides met inside the mountain was no mean feat. Upinos took two crews of engineers working on either side of the mountain with hammers and chisels cracking through the hard limestone to meet in the middle. Although rumors of this technological marvel persisted, it was only rediscovered around 170 years ago. And recently, some of its secrets have come to light. In the 1970s, German archaeologists spent 3 years excavating the entire tunnel and connecting aqueduct.
According to their measurements, it was built over 570 ft below the summit of the mountain and was around 3,400 ft in length. It was proof of's legendary achievement. It involved more than brute force. This called for precision surveying. If you imagine you've got two tunnels coming towards each other and if they were in parallel, they could very easily miss each other. Forupalinus the key lay with mathematics. He understood through geometry that if you angle both tunnels in the same direction, eventually their paths will cross. They will absolutely meet.
There's no doubt in that mathematically. It worked. After nearly 10 years backbreaking effort, the tunnelers finally met in the middle. They'd excavated well over 15,000 tons of rock and laid 5,000 sections of clay pipe. Once completed, abundant fresh water began to flow through the city's fountains and continued to do so for over a thousand years. Today, we have GPS and we have all sorts of laser measurement systems, but he didn't have any of those tools at his disposal. So, it's absolutely incredible that he succeeded.
Ukilinus had earned his place in the annals of engineering. Even today, engineers can struggle to ensure the water keeps flowing. In 2008, the Mediterranean island of Cyprus suffered a fourth consecutive year of low rainfall. By summer, it faced a full-blown drought. So, how could the authorities ensure water reached residents and the millions of tourists flocking there for holidays? At first, water was shipped in from Greece using tankers. But this wasn't viable in the long term. So, in the Turkish north of Cyprus, engineers came up with an ambitious plan. They decided to pipe water 50 miles from the mainland across the sea to the island.
First step was to build a massive new dam in Turkey, creating a reservoir holding over 4 1/2 billion cubic feet of water. Then came the construction of the longest underwater subc pipeline in the world. Engineers first built anchor platforms weighed down on the seabed. Then they attached ropes with buoyancy aids, enabling the 50-mi pipeline to be suspended above the seabed. At 820 ft down, it was safely below fishing stocks and shipping lanes. Water from the reservoir in Turkey was then pumped through the pipeline to Cyprus. As a result, the water supply to northern Cyprus was guaranteed. But for one ancient civilization across the sea from Cyprus, water supplies were never a problem.
Admired for its great advances in every area of human endeavor from the arts to science, technology to religion. Its engineering accomplishments include great monuments, pyramids, and temples. Ancient Egypt. Egyptian civilization developed along the banks of the river Nile. Each year around July, the Nile would flood, spilling over with water flowing down from mountains in the south. As the waters receded, they left behind rich soils, allowing agriculture to flourish. The extent of the yearly inundation determined how much food would be harvested that year. But flood levels were always unpredictable.
Too low, not enough fertilization, therefore your crop is inadequate. Too much and you end up sweeping away towns and also ruining the fields. So how did Egyptian engineers prepare for either feast or famine? In 2016, workers constructing the foundations of a water pumping station near the ancient city of Theuis uncovered a mysterious structure made from large limestone blocks. It was a circular well roughly 8 ft in diameter with a staircase leading down into its interior. Archaeologists inspected the site and realized it was part of a rare structure called a nyometer. Nylometer was the way in which the ancient Egyptians measured the flood of the Nile.
These nyometer wells were frequently located within the confines of temples where only the priests and rulers had access. How could they help predict the coming harvest? Okay, a nylometer is effectively a shaft connected to the Nile by a little tunnel and on the sides of it, you put markings and you look and see how high the water's come up that shaft and read off the numbers. Over many years, flood levels would have been recorded. They then presumably looked at tables drawn up over history and be able to work out whether they would be a good harvest, bad harvest, or indifferent harvest. This secret
knowledge was a source of power in ancient Egypt. In the early 1970s, Egypt's era of inundations finally came to an end when the Aswan High Dam became operational. Fully controlling the annual flood, it ensures water is now available for irrigation all year round. The dam has almost doubled Egypt's agricultural yield while improving navigation across the Nile, a boon to the fishing industry and tourism. It also provides half of the nation's power demands. Dams have been in use for over 5,000 years. Today, there are over 58,000 of them worldwide.
China has the most and recently completed one of the biggest in the world, the Three Gorges Dam. It's around 600 ft high, more than 7 1/2,000 ft long, and creates a reservoir with a surface area of around 400 square miles. To pull off this dazzling feat of engineering, engineers had to overcome a major problem. One of the biggest challenges that engineers faced in building this dam was that it's still a really major waterway and they had to find a way to allow ships to pass. When the dam first opened, ships used a series of locks to pass, but this added 3 or 4 hours to journey times. So engineers were tasked with finding a better solution.
Result, the world's largest elevator for ships. Vessels enter a reinforced concrete chamber suspended from 256 cables attached to counterweights. You sit the ship in a kind of lift car that's actually a big bucket of water. When the counterweights go down, the chamber rises or vice versa. At the top and bottom of the lift, the chamber sits at the same level as the river. So when its steel gate opens, a vessel can exit, cutting the time a ship takes to pass the dam to just 40 minutes. This brilliantly engineered solution is one key to the dam success.
The other is its hydroelect electric output. The three gorgeous dam is an unbelievable feat of engineering. It produces so much power, 22 1/2,000 megawatt. That's enough electricity to power both New York and Los Angeles every day. But dams can also have a negative impact, flooding large areas, forcing people to relocate and impacting ecosystems. Dams weren't the only means of controlling water in the ancient world. Engineers also came up with other ingenious devices. Although the Nile inundation provided rich soils in which to grow crops, the farmers of ancient Egypt still needed a constant flow of water to reach their plants. But how could this be guaranteed once
flood waters receded? Canals and ditches were dug out from the river leading into the fields. But engineering solutions were needed to then carry water to the crops. One such device was the shaded, first used for irrigation in around 3000 BC. A shadow is basically a beam of wood on a balance in the middle with a bucket on one end and a counterwe on the other so that you can easily lift quite heavy volumes of water up to a higher level. When correctly balanced, the counterwe supports a half-filled bucket. It takes a bit of labor to lower when empty, but only minimal effort to lift a full bucket.
Due to its simplicity, the shaded is still used today in some countries for irrigation. But there are certain parts of the world where agriculture has never been viable, and they're growing fast. Due to climate change, we're seeing more and more arable land turning into desert every year. Yet, thanks to modern engineers, in some places, the desert is now blooming. And the best place to observe this transformation is from space. From orbit, strange circular forms are starkly visible in some of the world's driest regions. When you see these green spots in this stark desert context, it's very striking and very unusual. It looks very out of place. Apparently, astronauts aboard the
International Space Station use them as landmarks. These circular areas are in fact crops. But how can they grow in the middle of a desert? It relies on an engineering solution called center pivot irrigation. Pivot irrigation is essentially a system where you look for water deep under the ground. So it could be up to 4 km deep. And these are really ancient sources of water that have been there for thousands of years. Once pumped to the surface, water flows along an irrigation arm powered to move around in a wide circle.
Water sprayed in very specific size droplets that can be controlled to be accurate depending on the crop requirement. This method wastes less water. Crops receive just the right amount to enable them to flourish. Some scientists are concerned center pivot irrigation may deplete deep water reserves, but there's no doubt this engineering is transforming some of the world's driest regions. Getting water to where it's needed most has always been an engineering challenge. Nowhere more so than for one ancient city with a population of over a million thirsty souls, all in need of fresh water.
Roman engineers were renowned for their ability to control the flow of water. Digging deep tunnels to transport it many miles. Building mighty structures across ravines and valleys to keep it flowing. Constructing luxurious heated public baths and lavish fountains, the Romans developed amazing water control technology. this massive network of interconnecting sewers and aqueducts and drains. Roman techniques for the collection, storage and delivery of water over huge distances were unsurpassed. Their engineers developed a host of innovative technologies.
The Romans are the masters of providing water wherever and whenever it's needed. But why go to such lengths? Like their famous road network, controlling water allowed the Romans to develop and supply their rapidly increasing population. The Romans knew that water was fundamental to the success of their civilization. Without a reliable water supply, the entire continent spanning empire could be threatened. A couple of days with no water, you have complete anarchy. But what were the technological breakthroughs that kept water flowing throughout the Roman Empire?
By the 2n century AD, ancient Rome had become the largest city in the world. home to well over a million people. To expand further, it desperately needed a constant, safe, and guaranteed supply of water. Rome is built on the river Tyber, and the Tyber provides some water. But as Rome expands, as it becomes one of the greatest cities in the world, it needs to find additional fresh water from elsewhere. So where did this additional supply come from? A vital clue was found during construction of the city's metro. It's one of the smallest in Europe. And part of the reason for this is because the ground underneath the city is so rich in archaeological remains. Every time a new tunnel is planned, they have
to excavate more area and discover more things which have to be investigated. In 2016, while extending one of the lines, workers stumbled across some impressive remains over 100 ft in length. After careful analysis, archaeologists concluded they were part of the oldest known Roman aqueduct, dating back to 312 BC. The first aqueduct to be built in Rome was the Aquaappia which was built by the sensor at the time Aius Claudius Kikus. At this early point in its history, Rome was at war with a tribe from southern Italy called the Samites. The Romans feared that the Samites might pollute the river Tyber, which was their main source of water. But the city's nearest alternative supply was a natural spring around 10 miles away.
Without the aid of mechanical pumps, how would engineers bring this water to Rome? The solution was to build an aqueduct to rely on gravity to create a such a gentle slope that water would trickle all the way into the city itself. The Aqua Appia was built with an incredibly shallow gradient, less than half a degree of descent. It was a great test of engineering skill. Too much of an incline and the fastoving water would erode the fabric of the aqueduct. Too little of a slope in the water itself can remain stagnant. So, it's an incredible engineering challenge. To get the gradient just right, engineers used a device called a Cororais.
Similar to modern spirit levels, it was a bench with attached plum lines and a groove carved into the middle containing water. Two sight holes at each end enabled a measurement to be taken using a ranging pole around 40 ft away. By raising and lowering the legs of the bench, the surveyor was able to plot the gradient of the aqueduct. But the aqueduct also had to be protected from possible attack. So the aquaia would be constructed mostly underground. To do this, the Romans used the so-called kernat method.
Well-like shafts were dug at consistent vertical intervals until they reached the desired depth. Cranes using pulley systems were used to lower building materials in and debris from the tunnels out. Workers then dug horizontal sloping tunnels linking the adjacent shafts together. The AIA supplied the city of Rome with an estimated 16 million gallons of water per day. There were around 700 taps in the city and about 200 of those were used for private purposes and the rest of those taps were for public use for public baths, for fountains and for draining the streets of Rome.
Over a period of around 500 years, a total of 11 aqueducts were built, bringing water to Rome from up to 60 m away. To this day, the Aqua Virgo, an aqueduct constructed in 19 BC, supplies water to one of Rome's most famous landmarks, the Trevy Fountain in the heart of the city. As time went on, the Romans constructed further aqueducts. some amazing feats of engineering right across the empire. Romans took their water engineering prowess with them wherever they went, creating magnificent structures from Spain to Syria, showing off not only their technical brilliance, but the amazing power of water itself.
Many structures still stand today. Testament to the prowess of ancient engineers. The Siggoia Aqueduct in Spain was built during the second half of the first century, while the Valance Aqueduct reached over 150 mi in length and provided water to Constantinople, modern-day East Istanbul. But one of the most impressive structures of all was built as part of an aqueduct found in southern France near the town of Neem. The Pondar is a Roman aqueduct bridge built in the 1st century AD. It remains an amazing spectacle of Roman engineering.
Designed to carry water over the river Gardon, this marvel stands 160 ft high and features three vertical rows of arches. So, how did engineers build one of the tallest of all Roman structures? Numerous scientific studies have revealed that an impressive volume of rock was needed to complete the Pontukar. A huge amount of rock went into its construction. over 21,000 cubic meters of rock which weighed over 50,000 tons. Moving this huge volume of material into position would require a combination of ingenuity and muscle power. The Romans invented the polypaston crane which allowed them to raise up immensely heavy stones. The key element of this
crane was a tread wheel in the center that acted very much like a hamster wheel. A crane operator would scamper around inside the device to power its lifting mechanism. A rope attached to a pulley was turned onto a spindle by the rotation of a wheel, allowing the device to hoist or lower the load. In comparison, for the ancient Egyptians, it took a large number of men to haul the 2 and 1/2 ton stone blocks used to build the pyramids. It's believed the poly's past in crane would be much more efficient, as moving the same 2 1/2 ton block would require just a small number of workers to lift it.
Incredibly, humanpowered treadwheel cranes remained in use until as recently as the 1900s. Once the pondar was finished, an estimated 44 million gallons of water flowed across it every day. And it has stood the test of time, surviving some serious flooding over the last 2,000 years. One extreme event in September 2002 in southern France claimed the lives of 21 people and caused millions of dollars of damage to towns and villages along the river Gardon. Over the past 10 years, 80 to 90% of all natural disasters worldwide have been a result of floods, droughts, tropical cyclones, heat waves, or severe storms.
Thanks to climate change, floods are increasing in frequency and intensity and may cause even greater damage in years to come. Cities and societies across the world are having to come up with ever more ingenious ways of coping with that danger. The solution may lie with novel large-scale projects. London, for example, is very low-lying and is seriously under threat from rising sea levels on the one hand and floods on the other. But fortunately, London is a place where engineering has led the way. In the early 80s, a barrier was built on
the city's eastern boundary. It spans 1,700 ft, the entire width of the river Temps. The tempame's barrier protects London from storm surges coming from the North Sea into the tempames. And essentially, it's made up of a series of gates. A total of 10 gates create a steel wall protecting an area of around 50 square miles. Each one is just under 66 feet tall, weighs over 3,600 tons, and can hold back a load of up to 9,000 tons. Ordinarily, six of these gates rest on the riverbed, but they're always on standby for a storm surge. If there's the danger that the river levels are rising, then the gates rotate into position and then stop the water from flooding into London.
So far, the temp's barrier has been raised nearly 200 times in order to prevent flooding in central London. As well as finding ways of holding water back, engineers have come up with spectacular ways to keep water in. Water is heavy. Fill up an Olympic size swimming pool and you're talking about around 600,000 gallons, making certain spectacular modern structures a challenge. When constructing swimming pools on top of buildings, there is no room for engineering structural errors. At the Marina Bay Sands Hotel in Singapore, an infinity pool perches 55 stories up. Supported across the top of three towers, including the lookout decks. It's longer than the Eiffel Tower laid on its side.
And at the Golden Nugget, Las Vegas is a 200,000galon shark filled aquarium. Fearless swimmers shoot down a three-story enclosed water slide carrying them within inches of the sharks. Large pools are nothing new. Public baths had been a feature of towns in ancient Greece, but it was the Romans who went crazy for them. Baths for washing and relaxing were a common feature of Roman cities throughout the empire. Public Bards were essential in cities because the majority of people would not have had bathrooms in their houses unless you were extremely wealthy. It
was very much a communal enterprise where all sections of society sat together. It was a duty almost and it wasn't just about keeping yourselves clean. This is where people went to discuss. It's where politics happened. It's where life was lived. At one point there were over 850 public baths in Rome alone. Some of these complexes took on monumental proportions, feats of engineering built with vast colonades, widespanning arches and spectacular domes. The interiors were often sumptuous affairs with fine mosaic floors, marble covered walls, and decorative statues. Within the baths were separate rooms containing pools at varying water temperatures.
The frigidarium cold pool, tempidarium for warm and calarium, the hot pool. The Romans would start off in the tepidarium to get ready for the calarium. And then at the end of that bathing process, you would go into the frigidarium to close up your pores again and get you ready for the outside. But how did engineers control the temperature of the rooms and water? Early baths were heated with simple brazers. But from the 1st century BC, a more sophisticated setup was deployed. An innovative and complex system known as a hypocost. Furnaces attached to the bathous produced hot air. This was fed below elevated floors and up through hollow walls, warming the rooms. Water was heated in boilers positioned above the
furnaces before being piped into the pools. Very early, very effective form of central heating. But underneath all the glamour, it would have been slaves feeding these furnaces, which was hard work. The baths of Caracala in the south of Rome are among the best preserved. Constructed in the 3rd century, their water came from the 57mm long Aqua Marsha, Rome's longest aqueduct. Around 50 furnaces were needed to heat the complex. The baths had four entrances and could accommodate as many as 8,000 daily visitors as well as spas and pools.
Caracala had shops and eeries. They were the place you went to hang out, to chat, to meet your friends, to gossip, to see who's wearing what. It was the place to see and be seen. Water may be vital for bathing, but it also plays a more hidden role in human hygiene as what goes in must come out. One of the interesting things about fresh water is that on the one hand it provides life, but on the other hand, it can be incredibly dangerous if waste water is not dealt with properly. It takes vast engineering infrastructure to deal with the millions of tons of sewage produced by large cities.
The average human produces over 320 lbs of excrement a year. If we don't have proper sewage systems to take this waste away, then our cities and our settlements become ridden with disease. And water engineers now face a growing problem in sewage systems across the world. Fatbergs, London, Belfast, Denver, and Melbourne are just a few of the cities where these monstrosities have been discovered in recent years. Fatburggs are massive deposits of congealed fats and other waste. New York City has spent $18 million over 5 years on tackling them. And in one London sewer, an 800 foot long fatburgg was discovered, weighing an estimated 130 tons, the size of 11
double-decker buses. It's down to workers called flushers to get rid of fatburgs. These fearless individuals wear protective clothing and carry gas monitors to ensure the air is safe to breathe. They're tasked with manually breaking apart the fatburgg, aided by suction pumps and power jets. But blockages are a problem as old as sewers themselves. In ancient Rome, slaves were reportedly sent underground to clear the drains. And it seems the bathsobsessed Romans may not have been quite as clean as previously thought. Roman cities would have been filthy. And we think that Roman pavements in many cities might have been built up very high so that Romans walking around
didn't have to go anywhere near the gutters. Open drains were filled with waste and raw sewage, causing an unimaginable stench. But in the 6th century BC, Rome's engineers came to the rescue with a huge infrastructure project. The Cloaka Maxima or the Great Drain was one of the earliest examples of Roman public sanitation. The Cloaka Maxima began as a type of open canal, but it developed into one of the most complex sewage systems in the ancient world. It was constructed as a stream which ran through the city, draining the city of excess water. The cloaka maxima originally measured over 320 ft long by 15 ft wide and stood 11 ft high. The Romans realized that they had to cover it up to protect the city from nasty smells.
But this presented a major engineering problem. The drain would have to be made waterproof. Roman engineers found a solution with a new type of concrete containing lime and potelana. Potalana derives from volcanic ash and when combined with lime and water creates a strong concrete mix. But the Romans also discovered a unique advantage to their new formulation. Unlike regular concrete, it could set in wet conditions. The resulting concrete that they made could actually set underwater and that was a really special feature.
This technology meant that as Rome grew, so too could its sewage system. The great sewer served the city for over 2,400 years and even today is still in use to carry storm water away into the river Tyber. And Roman civil engineering projects weren't limited to the capital. The Romans built them in other parts of their empire as well to make sure that those towns and cities were well protected from pollution and from the health issues that come with having inadequate hygiene standards. Unfortunately, these improvements didn't survive the fall of the empire. Down the centuries, Roman advances in sanitation were slowly forgotten.
Only a few cities, including Paris, preserved sections of their Roman sewage systems. What happens in the Middle Ages is that in most cases, these central systems of waste management have broken down. The towns, the cities of medieval Christensen were the most revolting places. It was a massive stink pot. Rats thrived among the excretor and epidemics of plague and cholera broke out killing millions of people about 25% of the medieval European population. But on a hilltop in the heart of Granada in southern Spain, engineers built a structure that bucked this trend. An oasis of cleanliness. Amid the general medieval muk, this 13th century palace was named the Alhhamra.
It's one of the great sites of Spain. It's one of the moments where you can go and stand and feel closest to Islamic Spain and you can see just what a rich and vibrant and exciting society that was. The monarch Muhammad Ibin Ahagma at that time had a vision of transforming a dusty hilltop into a lush oasis with a palace at its heart. So how was this dream made a reality? First engineers built a canal to carry water from a river 3 and 1/2 m upstream. This was channeled into large reservoirs on the hill above the Alhhamra from where it flowed down through a series of channels and pools to the palace.
Inside the Alhhamra is a complex network of channels for the water to flow just using gravity. However, water supply was seasonal and sporadic. So, a collection tower was used to make sure there was always enough water for the gardens, fountains, and baths, allowing the monarch's vision to be realized all year round. It was well watered. It was light. It was dazzling. It didn't smell. It must have seemed to travelers like paradise on Earth. Just as ancient engineers struggled to move water uphill and transport it ever greater distances, today it still remains a technological challenge.
Los Angeles, home to over 12 million people. There are an awful lot of people who want to live there and that means that they need water to support their irrigation, their agriculture, their lives. Average daily water consumption in LA is a colossal 131 gall per person. In such a dry part of California, essentially a desert, where can so much water be found? For years, Los Angeles relied on aqueducts to transport water from rivers many miles away. But as the metropolis grew, engineers had to look further a field. In the 1960s, construction began on a new aqueduct system.
This was infrastructure on a totally different scale. Stretching over 400 m, it would be the world's longest aqueduct. Beginning just east of San Francisco in the wetter north of the state, the California Aqueduct would wind its way south towards LA. The engineers faced a significant challenge at the end of the water's journey to get it to Los Angeles. The Tahatchi Mountains. There were two choices. Go through the mountain range or go over it. Above ground seemed the cheaper and quicker option. But how would engineers defy gravity and move such enormous quantities of water uphill? Essentially, engineers had to build one of the
biggest water lifts to get the water over the mountain. So to do this, they used enormous pumps that had 80,000 horsepower. 14 pumps were installed, requiring around 60 megawatt of power, enough electricity for a small city. The aqueduct's main channel, completed in 1973, supplies water to over 26 million people and 3/4 of a million acres of agricultural land. Today's engineers may have mastered the art of controlling water, but humans remain slaves to this vital resource. And it's likely the world will face ever more severe water shortages in the decades to come.
Already around one person in nine lacks access to clean, affordable water. And as the population grows, so too does demand. It could be a catastrophe in the making. Finding and distributing fresh water is continuing to be a big challenge to us in the modern world. The 20th century saw war over oil. The 21st century could very well be the century in which we see war over water. But engineering solutions could be at hand.
Distillation is a technology which is really important for being able to provide fresh water. Essentially turning salt water into fresh water. Desalination manages to make something deadly into something that can bring life. Currently, this method requires a lot of energy, making it costly while adding to global greenhouse gas emissions. As ever, the world is looking to engineers to find technological solutions ensuring the planet's taps continue to flow. From the earliest tunnel systems in ancient Greece to the simple tools that irrigated the Nile flood planes, the water infrastructure that dominated the Roman landscape
and intricate heating systems that warmed their public baths. Without the amazing innovations of ancient water engineers, disease and thirst may have held back the development of civilization and the modern luxury of fresh water on demand would not be possible. Thanks to engineers, safe and clean water may one day be available for all.
