Renaissance technology
Renaissance |
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Renaissance technology was the set of European artifacts and inventions which spread through the
Renaissance technology
Some important Renaissance technologies, including both innovations and improvements on existing techniques:
- mining and metallurgy
- blast furnace enabled iron to be produced in significant quantities
- finery forge enabled pig iron (from the blast furnace) into bar iron (wrought iron)
- nailmaking
- smeltmill increased the output of lead over previous methods (bole hill)
Late 14th century
Some of the technologies were the arquebus and the musket.
15th century
The technologies that developed in Europe during the second half of the 15th century were commonly associated by authorities of the time with a key theme in Renaissance thought: the rivalry of the Moderns and the Ancients. Three inventions in particular — the printing press, firearms, and the nautical compass — were indeed seen as evidence that the Moderns could not only compete with the Ancients, but had surpassed them, for these three inventions allowed modern people to communicate, exercise power, and finally travel at distances unimaginable in earlier times.[1]
Crank and connecting rod
The crank and connecting rod mechanism which converts circular into reciprocal motion is of utmost importance for the mechanization of work processes; it is first attested for Roman water-powered sawmills.[2] During the Renaissance, its use is greatly diversified and mechanically refined; now connecting-rods are also applied to double compound cranks, while the flywheel is employed to get these cranks over the 'dead-spot'.[3] Early evidence of such machines appears, among other things, in the works of the 15th-century engineers Anonymous of the Hussite Wars and Taccola.[4] From then on, cranks and connecting rods become an integral part of machine design and are applied in ever more elaborate ways: Agostino Ramelli's The Diverse and Artifactitious Machines of 1588 depicts eighteen different applications, a number which rises in the 17th-century Theatrum Machinarum Novum by Georg Andreas Böckler to forty-five.[5]
Printing press
The introduction of the mechanical
The mechanical device consists of a screw press modified for printing purposes which can produce 3,600 pages per workday,[6] allowing the mass production of printed books on a proto-industrial scale. By the start of the 16th century, printing presses are operating in over 200 cities in a dozen European countries, producing more than twenty million volumes.[8] By 1600, their output had risen tenfold to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies, while Gutenberg book printing spread from Europe further afield.[8]
The relatively free flow of information transcends borders and induced a sharp rise in Renaissance literacy, learning and education; the circulation of (revolutionary) ideas among the rising middle classes, but also the peasants, threatens the traditional power monopoly of the ruling nobility and is a key factor in the rapid spread of the
Parachute
The earliest known
Mariner's astrolabe
The earliest recorded uses of the
Dry dock
While
16th century
Floating dock
The earliest known description of a
Lifting tower
A lifting tower was used to great effect by Domenico Fontana to relocate the monolithic Vatican obelisk in Rome.[18] Its weight of 361 t was far greater than any of the blocks the Romans are known to have lifted by cranes.[18][A 1]
Mining, machinery and chemistry A standard reference for the state of mechanical arts during the Renaissance is given in the mining engineering treatise De re metallica (1556), which also contains sections on geology, mining and chemistry. De re metallica was the standard chemistry reference for the next 180 years.
Early 17th century
Newspaper
The
Air-gun
In 1607 Bartolomeo Crescentio described an air gun equipped with a powerful spiral spring, a device so complex that it must have had predecessors.[original research?] In 1610 Mersenne spoke in detail of "sclopeti pneumatici constructio", and four years later Wilkins wrote enthusiastically of "that late ingenious invention the wind-gun" as being "almost equall to our powder-guns". In the 1650s Otto von Guericke, famed for his experiments with vacua and pressures, built the Madeburger Windbuchse, one of the technical wonders of its time.[citation needed]
Tools, devices, work processes
15th century
Cranked Archimedes' screw
The German engineer Konrad Kyeser equips in his Bellifortis (1405) the Archimedes' screw with a crank mechanism which soon replaces the ancient practice of working the pipe by treading.[23]
Cranked reel
In the textile industry, cranked reels for winding skeins of yarn were introduced in the early 15th century.[24]
Brace
The earliest carpenter's braces equipped with a U-shaped grip, that is with a compound crank, appears between 1420 and 1430 in Flanders.[3]
Cranked well-hoist
The earliest evidence for the fitting of a well-hoist with cranks is found in a miniature of c. 1425 in the German Hausbuch of the Mendel Foundation.[25]
Paddle wheel boat powered by crank and connecting rod mechanism
While
Rotary grindstone with treadle
Evidence for rotary
Geared hand-mill
The geared hand-mill, operated either with one or two cranks, appears in the 15th century.[24]
16th century
Grenade musket
Two 16th-century German
Technical drawings of artist-engineers
The revived scientific spirit of the age can perhaps be best exemplified by the voluminous corpus of
However, these designs were not always intended to be put into practice, and often practical limitations impeded the application of the revolutionary designs. For example, da Vinci's ideas on the conical parachute or the winged flying machine were only applied much later. While earlier scholars showed a tendency to attribute inventions based on their first pictorial appearance to individual Renaissance engineers, modern scholarship is more prone to view the devices as products of a technical evolution which often went back to the Middle Ages.
Technology | Date | Author | Treatise | Comment |
---|---|---|---|---|
Pile driver | 1475[31] | Francesco di Giorgio Martini | Trattato di Architectura | Drawing of such a device whose principle must be according to the Brazilian historian of technology Ladislao Reti "considered original with Franceso".[32] |
Centrifugal pump | 1475[31] | Francesco di Giorgio Martini | Trattato di Architectura | Water or mud-lifting machine "that must be characterized as the prototype of the centrifugal pump".[31] |
See also
- Chariot clock
- History of science in the Renaissance
- Renaissance magic
Notes
- ^ 53.3 t at Trajan's Column (Lancaster 1999, p. 426); 60−100 t at the Jupiter temple of Baalbek (Coulton 1974, p. 16).
Footnotes
- ^ Boruchoff 2012, 133-163.
- ^ Ritti, Grewe & Kessener 2007, p. 161
- ^ a b White 1962, p. 112
- ^ White 1962, p. 113
- ^ White 1962, p. 172
- ^ a b Wolf 1974, pp. 67f
- Christian era.
- ^ ISBN 978-968-16-3867-2, pp. 58f
- ^ McLuhan 1962; Eisenstein 1980; Febvre & Martin 1997; Man 2002
- ^ British Library Add MS 34113, folio 200v
- ^ a b White 1968, pp. 462f
- ^ a b White 1968, p. 465
- ^ John Wilkins (1614–1672): Mathematical Magic of the Wonders that may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry, part I: Concerning Mechanical Powers Motion, part II, Dead-loss or Mechanical Motions, published in London in 1648
- ^ Stimson 1985, p. 576
- ^ Wikander 2000, pp. 326−328
- ^ Sarton 1946, p. 153
- ^ Sarton 1946, pp. 153f.
- ^ a b Lancaster 1999, p. 428
- ^ World Association of Newspapers: "Newspapers: 400 Years Young!"; Weber 2006, p. 396
- ^ Weber 2006, p. 387
- ^ a b c Weber 2006, p. 396f
- ^ Weber 2006, p. 399
- ^ White 1962, pp. 105, 111, 168
- ^ a b White 1962, p. 111
- ^ White 1962, p. 167; Hall 1979, p. 52
- ^ Hall 1979, pp. 80f.
- ^ White 1962, p. 114
- ^ White 1962, p. 110
- ^ White 1962, p. 167
- ^ Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, München, Inv. nos. W 1450, W 1451
- ^ a b c Ladislao Reti, "Francesco di Giorgio Martini's Treatise on Engineering and Its Plagiarists", Technology and Culture, Vol. 4, No. 3. (Summer, 1963), pp. 287-298 (290)
- ^ Ladislao Reti, "Francesco di Giorgio Martini's Treatise on Engineering and Its Plagiarists", Technology and Culture, Vol. 4, No. 3. (Summer, 1963), pp. 287-298 (297f)
References
- Boruchoff, David A. (2012), "The Three Greatest Inventions of Modern Times: An Idea and Its Public." Entangled Knowledge: Scientific Discourses and Cultural Difference, Munster and New York: Waxmann, pp. 133–136, ISBN 978-3-8309-2729-7
- Coulton, J. J. (1974), "Lifting in Early Greek Architecture", S2CID 162973494
- ISBN 0-521-29955-1
- ISBN 1-85984-108-2
- Hall, Bert S. (1979), The Technological Illustrations of the So-Called "Anonymous of the Hussite Wars". Codex Latinus Monacensis 197, Part 1, Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, ISBN 3-920153-93-6
- Lancaster, Lynne (1999), "Building Trajan's Column", S2CID 192986322
- ISBN 978-0-7472-4504-9
- ISBN 978-0-8020-6041-9
- Ritti, Tullia; Grewe, Klaus; Kessener, Paul (2007), "A Relief of a Water-powered Stone Saw Mill on a Sarcophagus at Hierapolis and its Implications", Journal of Roman Archaeology, 20: 138–163, S2CID 161937987
- S2CID 144849113
- Stimson, Alan (1985), The Mariner's Astrolabe. A Survey of 48 Surviving Examples, Coimbra: UC Biblioteca Geral
- Weber, Johannes (2006), "Strassburg, 1605: The Origins of the Newspaper in Europe", German History, 24 (3): 387–412,
- White, Lynn Jr. (1962), Medieval Technology and Social Change, Oxford: At the Clarendon Press
- White, Lynn Jr. (1968), "The Invention of the Parachute", S2CID 111425847
- Wikander, Charlotte (2000), "Canals", in ISBN 90-04-11123-9
- Wolf, Hans-Jürgen (1974), Geschichte der Druckpressen (1st ed.), Frankfurt/Main: Interprint