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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works dot com

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Speaker 1: where smart Happens him Marshall Brain. If you've ever been

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Speaker 1: to Las Vegas, you know that there are fountains everywhere.

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Speaker 1: They all depend on huge pumps driven by electric motors

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Speaker 1: to spray the water. If you've ever been to Rome,

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Speaker 1: you know that there are also many fountains. But some

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Speaker 1: of them have existed for two thousand years, long before

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Speaker 1: there were motors and pumps. So what powered the fountains

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Speaker 1: of Rome. The simple answer is gravity. Rome received all

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Speaker 1: of its water more than thirty million gallons a day

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Speaker 1: through a system of aqueducts. All water flowed to the

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Speaker 1: city by gravity because it was arriving from surrounding hills.

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Speaker 1: Water could be stored in large cisterns, very similar in

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Speaker 1: concept to today's water towers, except that the water came

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Speaker 1: into the cisterns from the top. Water flowed from the

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Speaker 1: cisterns either through pipes to individual houses or to public

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Speaker 1: distribution points. Fountains serve both decorative and functional purposes, since

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Speaker 1: people could bring their buckets to the fountain to collect water.

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Speaker 1: The cisterns provided the height needed to generate water pressure

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Speaker 1: for the Fountain's to Spray. Do you have any ideas

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Speaker 1: or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me

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Speaker 1: an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com.

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Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, go

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Speaker 1: to how stuff works dot com