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Pompeii fixed potholes with molten iron (2019)
A new study suggests the Romans knew how to melt iron and used it to fill in wheel ruts and cavities on their stone streets
That’s because most of the streets in the bustling seaside city were paved with silex, a type of cooled lava stone that wore away relatively quickly, leaving ruts from wagon wheels. By the late 1st century A.D., Rome was already producing 550 tons of iron annually from deposits in recently conquered Britain, from an area in the southeast of the island called the Weald. But lead author Eric Poehler of the University of Massachusetts Amherst writes that stray iron drops found on the street suggest that the molten metal was carried from a furnace to the repair site.
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