2000 Years of Roman Pipe Technology and 100 Years of American Pump Technology

This past week I and Jeff Olsen, AFT’s V.P. of Technology, attended the annual conference of the Hydraulic Institute. The Hydraulic Institute (HI) was founded in 1917 and is America’s premiere pump organization. At this year’s meeting HI held a centennial celebration.

For a technology organization like HI, 100 years is quite a feat and was rightly celebrated at the annual meeting this year. Many of you are familiar with HI through the standards HI creates. These standards show up in AFT Fathom in several places:

• Intake design (pump submergence to avoid vortex formation)
• Pump viscosity corrections
• Slurry pumps (SSL module)

Jeff and I enjoyed the sessions as well as meeting numerous users of our software who we had never met before. This included users at a large international water/wastewater design firm, a nuclear power plant in the western USA, and a traditional fossil power utility in the northeastern USA.

Two weeks before the HI centennial conference I was in Israel where I taught a training class to an AFT customer. While there I took some time to visit some of the historical/cultural sites. One day I visited the Israel Museum in Jerusalem which is one of the top archaeological museum in the world. The exhibits show human history going back many thousands of years. One of the exhibits was of Roman piping made of limestone which was from some 2000 years ago. Below are some photos I took.

The Roman piping I saw fascinated me and made me want to do further research on how Roman engineers accomplished what they did with the limited resources compared to the modern world. The Romans controlled and developed the known world for centuries. The Hydraulic Institute has only been around for one century. But HI standards similarly influence the entire known world. For maybe another 2000 years?

Roman piping from 2000 years ago made of limestone (Israel Museum, Jerusalem)