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For the past few thousand years, engineers assumed that the best way to move water round a right angle was as you’d probably expect – just round a bend in the shape of a quarter of a circle. It makes sense; the water pressure is maintained and you’d expect it to flow perfectly round. The engineers did well. They were intuitive, and used the best configuration they knew of. When the first piped water flowed round the fist-ever bend in the first-ever pipe and nothing awful happened, I doubt anyone breathed a sigh of relief. It makes perfect sense it would flow around, and it did, and that’s the way the system stayed until very recently.
