par Martino, Davide 
Référence Scientiae 2023 conference (07-10/06/2023: Prague, Czechia)
Publication Non publié, 2023-06-09
Référence Scientiae 2023 conference (07-10/06/2023: Prague, Czechia)
Publication Non publié, 2023-06-09
Communication à un colloque
| Résumé : | In 1554, the Milanese physician Girolamo Cardano published a woodcut showing a set of hydraulic screws, used in the Free Imperial City of Augsburg to fill a reservoir. Although examples of eighteenth-century hydraulic machinery have been preserved in Augsburg, this sixteenth-century technical marvel has not. Just like it, most of the hydraulic tools from early modern Europe have been lost, destroyed, or altered in the intervening centuries. This paper will compensate for this loss by turning to early modern machine books, with their pictorial and written records of contemporary machinery. Konrad Gruter’s De machinis et rebus mechanicis (1424), the earliest known machine book, will be compared with two further works which, despite not being machine books, included depictions of hydraulic machines: Georg Agricola’s De re metallica (1556) and Salomon de Caus’s De la raison des forces mouvantes (1615). Composed in three subsequent centuries, these works have been chosen to showcase the diversity of pursuits which could justify the deployment of hydraulic machines, from mining to music. For all their differences, comparing them reveals striking similarities, and allows this paper to trace the development of key tools—windlasses, pistons, and valves—from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. |
