Ancient Roman Baths
The ancient Romans baths were built in countless public areas in their cities, towns and in the residences of wealthy people. The third century A.D. marked the development of the skill of designing and engineering fully integrated complexes, complete with the water supply and drainage system, ensuring adequate supply of water from hot or cold basins. An average sized public bath was calculated to use 15 to 20,000 cubic meters of water each day.
Bathing was a big part of the ancient Roman people’s daily routine. After working through the morning, most upper class Romans spent the afternoon in the public bath. Besides hygienic purposes, Roman baths also serves as a social meeting place. It was where men and women would with meet their friends, spend time exercising and reading in the library.
The traditional Roman bath used the Hypocaust system in designing and building the pools. This system involved an under floor heating system that used hot air to heat up the basement fires, which are made to flow between the concrete, brick or stone columns that supported the ground floor. The hot air was also made to flow through the wall ducts to warm up the rooms of the bath. Many times, Romans had to wear wooden sandals to keep their feet from getting burned by the hot floor. The slaves were stationed at the basement of the bathhouses with fire.
To maintain a steady supply of water in the bath pools, ancient Roman builders created branches of aqueducts to direct water into the bathhouses. The water was stored in separate chambers for easy maintenance. This system allowed gravity to drive the water through the pipes, passing through the gardens and into the main building. Inside the main building, the water from the aqueduct was then subjected to a more complicated distribution system that carried the water to the cold pools and boilers. The boilers were water compartments that were placed over wood fires to heat up water for warm baths.
Since bathing houses had both hot and cold basins, they also had outlets for each basin to allow drainage. These outlets ran below the level of the distribution pipes, taking the waste water to the municipal drain located at a nearby valley.
To allow easy inspection and maintenance, the distribution and drainage channels and pipes of ancient Roman baths were traditionally housed in tunnels. To house the heaters, A different network of tunnels was used to facilitate storage of extremely large amounts of wood; the same wood that would be used to fuel the furnaces. An average bath usually had about fifty furnaces. These furnaces were the ones that heated the water; additionally, they heated the rooms by establishing a system of hot air beneath the floor. Usually, the heated rooms were built on the South-Western side of the building in order to take full advantage of the sun’s rays, making it the hottest room in the building. Hollow terra cotta tubes were run inside the walls to provide insulation and channels for the hot air to pass through.
Ancient Roman baths normally were crowded. People went there at least once a day; some scholars today even argue that going to the bath was the central event in daily ancient Roman living. At one time, an average bath would accommodate up to 900 people, while smaller ones housed only 300. Some of the biggest baths could accommodate as many as 1,500 people. Baths were never free, people paid a specific amount for the time spent in the building and children were never permitted to enter the baths.
