Roman aqueducts drop only one inch every hundred yards
Roman engineers built a 30-mile stone bridge so precisely that the water inside dropped only the thickness of a thumb over the length of a football field.
The Pont du Gard in southern France is a towering testament to the Roman obsession with gravity. To bring 40,000 cubic meters of fresh water to the city of Nîmes every day, engineers had to maintain a near-perfect downward slope over a 50-kilometer route. The bridge itself drops only 2.5 centimeters over its 275-meter span—an error margin so small it would be difficult to replicate today without laser levels.
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