Romans heated homes and baths with underfloor system
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In the Roman Empire, people heated public bathhouses and private villas using a clever underfloor heating system called the hypocaustum.
This system transported hot air throughout buildings to warm spaces, sometimes so much that visitors needed sandals. The hypocaustum involved raising floors on small pillars, between 60 and 100 centimeters high, and circulating hot air from a furnace, called a praefurnium, beneath them. The Romans weren’t the first to use underfloor heating.
The writer Vitruvius credited Caius Sergius Orata with the invention, initially for fish ponds, but archaeological evidence shows civilizations in Asia used similar systems thousands of years earlier, introducing the technology to Europe via Greece. Building and maintaining a hypocaustum was labor-intensive, requiring a constant fire and a large wood supply, work often performed by enslaved people.
Archaeologists have discovered remnants of hypocaustums across the Roman world, including in Pompeii, Sicily, Bath (England), and Maastricht in the Netherlands, demonstrating the widespread use and preservation of the technology. While temperatures varied depending on the distance from the furnace, the system could warm multiple rooms from a single oven, and the Romans also applied the technique to walls using hollow bricks.
