Mathematics, Mechanics and the Origins

of the Culture of Mechanical Invention

ALEXANDER KELLER

OVER THE PAST few decades, there has been much argument about the
relationship between science and technology. 1 Is science a form of
technology, and technology the real motive for science, or at least for the
reception of science by society? Is modern technology but the application of
the discoveries of scientific research? This discussion incorporates several
subordinate debates; one such has concerned the extent to which the
classical industrial revolution of the eighteenth century derived, as the egg
from the chicken, from the scientific revolution of the preceding years. 2
Another debate takes the question back to the years before the emergence
of modern science in the triumphant mechanical-experimental philosophy
of the mid-seventeenth century, and asks whether this philosophy was not
formulated and adopted primarily in the hope of creating as a result a new
technology, whereby new inventions would be multiplied, as new and
improved understanding of the forms of nature was generated by new and
improved "mechanical-experimental" methods. 3 There is indeed one view
of Francis Bacon, for example, and of his place in the scientific revolution,
which sees his "great instauration" in just these terms. 4

Mathematics and Rationality

These questions might be clarified, and an answer more clearly
approximated, if we look back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and
think in terms not of "science"--an anachronism--nor of "technology"--
still more anachronistic--but rather of mathematics and arts. What were the
common features of both scientific and industrial revolutions? Could we not
agree that there were two main factors? The first was the application of
mathematical rationality. 5 How do we know what is the rational solution,

Recent debates are summarised in Keller, A., "Has Science Created Technology?",
Minerva, XXII (Summer 1984), pp. 160-182. See also Gille, B. (ed.), Histoire des techniques
(Paris: Gallimard, 1978), particularly, Russo, F., "Science et Technique", pp. 1,111-1,145; and
Gille, B., "Essai sur la connaissance technique", pp. 1,416-1,477; and Laudan, L. (ed.), The
Nature of Technological Knowledge: Are Models of Scientific Change Relevant? (Dordrecht:
D. Reidel, 1984).
2 Keller A., op. cit., pp. 164-166; Hall, A. R., "What did the Industrial Revolution Owe to
Science?", in McKendrick, N. (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and
Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb (London: Europa, 1974), pp. 129-151.
3 Keller, A., op. cit., pp. 163--164.
4 Farrington, B., Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1951).
5 Landes, D. S., The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial
Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1969).
 The Origins of the Culture of Mechanical Invention 349

what the one best answer is to a given problem? Do we not find this out by
the measurement of relevant quantities, or else by a geometrical logic that
springs from the necessary relationships of spatial arrangements? The
second factor was the expectation that the application of this mathematical
rationality would lead to indefinite improvement, to ever better solutions to
the problems of how to attain our ends. If we do x we will achieve y, a y that
perhaps does not now exist, but could be brought into existence because it
can be shown, by arguments based on the model of geometrical theorems, to
follow from x.
If we speak of a mathematical revolution that preceded both the adoption
of the mechanical-experimental philosophy and the new inventions, mainly
mechanical, that industrialised Western Europe in the eighteenth century
and after, would we not find ourselves in almost unfrequented territory?
Some historians have seen the work of Tartaglia and others as the
mechanical component in later science ;6 but they seem very little interested
in the investigation of this component, by comparison with, for example,
neo-Platonic, neo-Aristotelian or neo-Pythagorean elements. Professor
Angus Buchanan has taken up David Landes' phrase in his paper on "The
Promethean Revolution", but he too looks for the roots in social
relationships of a general kind. 7 Books specifically on the scientific
revolution include the sixteenth century, but that is mainly because of
Copernicus and Tycho Brahe in astronomy, and the developments in
anatomy that are agreed to be preconditions for the work of Harvey and
later physiologists. On the whole, apart from astronomy, the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries are held to be rather unoriginal scientifically. So
historians may point out that the ancient world-picture was still generally
accepted, and informed literature and art, as well as learned philosophy. 8
Similarly, in histories of technology, the period of the Renaissance is
considered unexciting. Over the past 30 years or so, there has been a new
look at medieval technology, from watermill and windmill to compass, clock
and gunpowder, and spectacles, the last three all around 1300. Professors
Lynn White and Bertrand Gille have notably modified the image of the
Middle Ages as one of backward gloom. 9 However, although there is an
6 Kierney, H., Science and Change 1500--1700 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1971),
pp. 46-47; Koyr6, A., "La Dynamique de Nicolo Tartaglia", in La Science au seizi~me si~cle.
Colloque International de Royaumont (Paris: Hermann, 1960), pp. 91-116.
7 Landes, D., op. cit.; Buchanan, R. A., "The Promethean Revolution: Science,
Technology and History", in Hall, A. R. and Smith, N. (eds), History o f Technology: First
Annual Volume 1976 (London: Mansell, 1976), pp. 73-84.
8 This view is classically expressed in Tillyard, E. M. W., The Elizabethan World Picture
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1949); and Butterfield, H., The Origins o f Modern Science
1300--1800 (London: G. Bell, 1949).
9 White, L., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1962); Machina ex Deo (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968); and Medieval Religion and
Technology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), See also, Gille, B., "Le Moulin
l'eau: Une Rdvolution technique m6di6vale", Techniques et civilisations, III (1954),
pp. 1-15; and "Le Moyen Age", in Gille, B.~ Histoire des techniques, op. cit.; Gimpel, J.,
Rdvolution industrielle du Moyen Age (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975).
350 Alexander Keller

extensive literature devoted to the economic history of early modern

Europe, little is said of any innovative technology; it is implied that there
were two arid centuries between Gutenberg's printing-press and the
pendulum clock, or even the steam engines of Papin, Savery and
Newcomen.

Mathematics and Educational Reform

Another intellectual movement, a change in expectations rather than in
achievements, should therefore be given more recognition. This movement
certainly caused less stir than political and religious events, not least because
it aroused little or no opposition at the time and did not involve intervention
by the state, except in a mildly sympathetic way. The consequences,
however, were no less revolutionary. In the 1560s and 1570s, a number of
writers developed a programme and a rhetoric on behalf of a mathematical
education.
Tartaglia, the author of books on mathematical artillery--his Nova
Scientia was the first attempt at a scientific ballistics H~--published in 1543 an
Italian Euclid, 11 which he prefaced with a list of all the mathematical arts,
including painting, architecture, chorography (i.e. surveying), war
machines and fortifications, ancient and modern, geography--and,
addressing Gabriele Tadino, to whom the book is dedicated, commented on
their discussions "on your navigational charts and your German globe".
Other writers of textbooks went into much more detail. Robert Recorde
claimed in the dedication of his Pathway of Knowledge, published in 1551,
that "Carpenters, Karvers, Joyners and masons doo willingly acknowledge
that they can worke nothyng without reason of geometrie" and he went on to
assemble all the arts which needed it, for instance, in ships, because "their
compas, their carde, their pulleis, their ankers were found by the skill of
witty geometers". 12 Peverone, in his Italian treatise on geometry in 1558,
declared that men would be quarrelling over the division of lands without
geometry: "How would the bombardier without it determine his shots,
which now violently leap up, and now by natural course come down? How
would they fit together the work of the laborious joiner? What proportion
would the ingenious master give to his c l o c k s . . . How would the engineer
know how to measure inaccessible places, or how to draw up the plans of
countries and cities? Or design bastions, cavaliers, t r e n c h e s . . . ?,,13
There is nothing like shoe leather, says the cobbler, according to an old
1o Tartaglia, N., La Nova Scientia lnventa da Niccolo Tartaglia (Venice: S. da Sabio, 1537).
N Tartaglia, N., Euclide Megarense reassettato et alia integrite ridotto per Niccolo Tartalea
(Venice: Monferra, 1543).
12 Recorde, R., The Pathway to Knowledge, containing the First Principles o f Geometrie
(London: Reginalde Wolfe, 1551; facsimile edn, Norwood, NJ: Walter J. Johnson, 1974); from
"Preface Declaring Briefely the Commodities of Geometrye and the Necessitye Thereof",
sig(3 i.
Peverone, G. F., Due Brevi e Facili Trattati, il Primo d'Arithmetica; l'Altro di Geometria
(Lyons: G. de Toures, 1558), pp. 63-64.
 The Origins o f the Culture o f Mechanical Invention 351

English proverb, and it may be argued that the forewords and dedications of
textbooks in mathematical subjects would be inclined to say what a
wonderful thing mathematics is. Were these claims accepted, and if so why?
Presumably, more weight can be attached for instance to the public oration
of Ramus before Catherine de' Medici, queen mother of France, which was
published in 1567 as P r o o e m i u m -Mathematicum, and subsequently as part of
his Scholae M a t h e m a t i c a e ] 4 because Ramus was not a professional
mathematician, and even if he did write textbooks of geometry and
arithmetic, he was very much the Renaissance humanist, a man who had
criticised Aristotelian natural philosophy and logic but remained a logician
and philosopher all his life. He came to feel that mathematics had been
unwisely neglected in his native land, and that neglect was the cause of its
economic decline, so he believed, by comparison chiefly with Germany.
There, he claimed, the application of mathematics had radically improved
the mining industry, as well as the art of fortification, and so the wealth and
power of the German princes were in the ascendant. More teaching of
mathematics in France would soon return France to her proper place among
the nations; for then, said Ramus, "Mars gallicus, Vulcanus gallicus
efficietur. ''15 Besides urging the endowment of an additional chair of
mathematics at the Coll6ge royal in Paris, Ramus showed he meant what he
said by leaving money in his will for that purpose: 16 he would not just ask
others to provide.
Why did Ramus think mining and metallurgy were dependent on
mathematics? Partly, perhaps, because of the use of the compass
underground, the possibility of mine plans, but mainly because of the
machinery used in the mines. Machines were certainly regarded as
explicable only by mathematical means, so that more mathematics would
lead to a better understanding of how machines worked, why they went
wrong, how they could be made to work better, and how to make new
machines. In practice, that might be restricted to machines which depended
directly on the law of the lever, through the so-called five simple machines:
the lever, wedge, pulley, screw and windlass, as they had been described by
Heron and Pappus in Roman Alexandria. In theory, all the most
complicated machines could be reduced to combinations of these simple
types; they in turn could be reduced to the lever and wedge; these through
the theorems of Archimedes and the supposedly Aristotelian Quaestiones
Mechanicae to the properties of the circle, to ratios of lengths and weights
and arcs, to gear ratios which compared radii or numbers of teeth. But
the geometer had nothing to say about friction or the strength of materials;
he could not really explain why a spring worked. The conservation and
|4 Ramus, P. Prooemium Mathematicurn (Paris: Andreas Wechel, 1567); and Scholae
Mathematicae (Basle: EusebiusEpiscopius& NicholasFrater, 1569).
15Ramus,P., Prooemium, op. cit., p. 303.
16Waddington,C., Ramus, sa Vieses Ecrits etses Opinions (Paris: 1855),p. 326.The context
is discussedby Hooykaas,R., Humanisme, science et rdforme. Pierre de la Ramde (1515-1572),
(Leiden: E. J. Brill 1958).
352 Alexander Keller

storage of force was altogether an insuperable problem for the pre-Galilean

mechanician.
Recorde added to the compass and card (chart) of navigation, the pulleys
and anchors, all "found by the skill of witty geometers", and remarked that
"to sette forth the capstocke [capstan] and eache other part would make a
greate showe of geometrie's arte". Other arts too, he claimed, owe their
more complex implements to the same instruction: "the wheele that doth
spinne, the stone that doth grind, the myll that is driven by water or
winde. ''17 John Dee, who produced new editions of Recorde's textbooks
after the latter's death, Is also supplied an introduction to the first English
translation of Euclid in 1571. Here he sets out a fanciful table of
mathematical sciences and the arts which depend on them. 19 His baroque
terminology found few admirers in his own time, or since. Recorde's list of
crafts which use mathematics, or Tartaglia's straightforward list of
mathematical arts proper, are more helpful. But it is worth noting that Dee's
exposition laid greater stress on the mechanical applications of such peculiar
branches of learning as "helicosophy", on which Archimedes had founded
his wonderful engines, and which was still used in the jacks of Dee's time.
Other such sciences explained the working of gears and levers.
Ramus too explained how geometry lets us understand how machines
work--his ideas were mainly taken from the pseudo-Aristotelian
Quaestiones Mechanicae, however; he takes us from pulley-block, through
cartwheels, winches, tongs, shears, saws, presses. Tartaglia had included
mechanics among his mathematical arts, as the "science of weights", the
source of every ingenious mechanical invention, and like most of these
authors, named Archimedes as the perfect example of a mathematical
mechanician. It was unfortunate for them that Archimedes never bothered
to describe the geometry of his famous inventions. Ramus did not say much
about mining engineering, but one suspects that he was influenced by the
success of Georgius Agricola's De Re Metallica, which enjoyed an enormous
reputation throughout Europe; the most prominent chapter dealt with the
machines used in mining, mostly pumps, some hoists and a remarkable
crusher--the illustrations made this the best known part of the book. 2~

Clocks and Automata: The 1deal Mathematical Machines

Among the machines which embody mathematical principles, several
authors mention clocks and automata. Indeed, clockwork figures appear in
17 Recorde, R., op. cit.
18 Dee was the editor of Recorde, R., The Grounde of Artes, Now of Late Overseen and
Augmented with New and Necessarie Additions (London: Reginalde Wolfe, 1561).
19 Billingsley, H., The Elements of Geometrie of the most Ancient Philosopher Euclide of
Megara . . . with a very Fruitfull Praeface made by M. L Dee, Specifying the Chief Mathematicall
S c i e n c e s . . . (London: John Day, 1570). See also, Billingsley, H., facsimile edn, Dee, John,
The Mathematicall Preface to the Elements of Geometrie, ed. Debus, A. G. (New York: Science
History Publications, 1975).
2o Agricola, G., De Re Metallica (Basle: Froben, 1556): English translation, Hoover,
Herbert Clark and Hoover, Lou, De Re Metallica (New York: Dover Publications, 1950).
 The Origins of the Culture of Mechanical Invention 353

lists of modern inventions, although the inquisitive might find many of the
techniques used in the works of Heron of Alexandria. The mechanisms of
transmission had changed somewhat, but the fascination of automata lay in
their demonstration of how the simplest movements of springs, cords and
levers could mimic the actions of living creatures. Indeed, Descartes later
took the water-powered automata of the royal gardens of France as
examples that suggest how human muscles work. Where automata were
mounted in the framework of a clock, the idea of mathematical mechanism
was displayed in its most brilliant form. The clock translated the flow of time
visibly and audibly into the exactly measurable dimensions of space; the
automata enlivened and illustrated the reduction of complex action to
geometrical simplicity. The passages of the heavens were written on the face
of the clock; the human microcosm adorned it, and yet worked according to
the same principles. Ramus pointed to the great planetarium clocks of his
day as the chief glories of his civilisation, the ideal exemplar of its
mathematics, which marked out the cultured from the barbarian. 21 He
related how King Christian of Denmark presented a silver "automaton"
showing the celestial motions to Tsar Ivan, whose disdainful remarks on it
are condemned by Ramus. By comparison, Ramus praised the enthusiastic
reaction of the Sultan Suleiman, when the Emperor Ferdinand sent him a
device, also of silver, in which the hours and motions of sun and moon were
shown by mechanisms that would "maintain the most minute measures of
time for long ages". Towards the end of the century, Suleiman's successor
received a similar automaton, this time with an organ attached, from Queen
Elizabeth of England. Both gifts were accompanied by a leaflet of
instructions and a craftsman to explain and maintain the machine; the
Englishman left a quaint journal of his trip to Constantinople. 22 Ramus was
well enough acquainted with the history of these devices to know that this
giving of automata as royal presents had once passed in the opposite
direction. As he commented, Charlemagne had received such a gift from a
Moslem ruler--Ramus thought, from Persia. 23 That goes to show, he said,
how much mathematics was esteemed by those whom the European
Christians believed to be barbarous. These grand works of art, like the
public clocks which spread through Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, are the splendid versions of the simpler clocks and watches which,
especially after the application of springs to clocks in the late fifteenth
century, became a necessary feature of bourgeois households and the
gentry. As Recorde said, "clocks that be made, the time to devide, the
wittiest invencion that ever was spied, nowe that they are common they are
not r e g a r d e d . . . ,,.24

21 Ramus, P., Prooemium Mathematicum, op. cit., pp. 293-297.

22 Dallam's journal in Bent, J. T. (ed.), Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant (London:
Hakluyt Society, 1893).
23 Ramus, P., Prooemium Mathematica, op. cir.
24 Recorde, R. op. cit.
354 A l e x a n d e r Keller

H u m a n i s t Views o f the Utility o f A n c i e n t M a t h e m a t i c s

In effect, Ramus, Dee and others asserted that what a country needed was
more mathematics in almost every branch of its life, for almost every human
activity used or ought to use mathematical methods. Almost every trade
would be improved if its practitioners had a good grounding in mathematics,
because mathematics was the most certain form of earthly knowledge, the
most reliable and the most permanent. What once was proved true
mathematically must always be true; and what could be thus proved true,
was more surely true than any other proposition that had not the support of
divine revelation. Galileo and his school were to argue that any
comprehension of nature would have to be expressed in mathematical
terms. Indeed, any satisfactory attempt to explain the workings of nature
had to provide tests designed to give answers in quantitative terms. These
earlier advocates of mathematics do not seem to have driven their case so
far. All the same, this idea was not quite unknown to all of them, even if we
may suspect that they would look for numerological or astrological types of
mathematical explanation. Oronce Fin6, first professor of mathematics in
the new Coll~ge royal, set out as a motto on the frontispiece of his
P r o t o m a t h e s i s , beneath a figure of Urania, muse of astronomy, the words:
"Since thoughtful Nature has created by number and measurement, and
then enclosed each thing in its own weight; you will not be able to
understand the proper causes of things unless you establish the numbers,
and are at the same time a geometer. ''25
One reason why this phenomenon of the enthusiasm for mathematics has
not caught the attention of historians may be that the mathematics in
question was seldom new. The promoters of mathematics in the handicrafts
and technology did not seek new mathematical knowledge since they
thought the truths of mathematics were permanently valid. There was
sometimes dissatisfaction with the structure and format of textbooks
inherited from classical antiquity, a dissatisfaction that led to the new
textbooks of Ramus, or the proposed textbook--it never saw the light of
day, h o w e v e r - - o f his compatriot, the architect Philibert de l'Orme, 26 or the
series of books which Robert Recorde produced, masterpieces of the art of
making mathematics enjoyable .27 There was no such dissatisfaction with the
contents. For that, Euclid retained his crown, and indeed continued to do so
long after Aristotle had lost his.
A former pupil of Fin6, Antoine Mizauld, in the dedication of his late
master's D e R e b u s Mathematicis H a c t e n u s Desideratis (1556) spoke of the
" m a n y admirable machines which have been constructed with geometric
reason and proportion in all ages, among those peoples with whom the study
25 Fin6, O., Protomathesis (Paris: Morrhius & Petrus, 1532).
26 L'Orme, P. de, Premier Tome de l'Architecture (Paris: Morel, 1568), p. 62.
27 Recorde, R,, The Pathway to Knowledge, op. cit. ; The Grounde of Artes (London:
Reginalde Wolfe, 1543); The Castle of Knowledge (London: Reginalde Wolfe, 1556); The
Whetstone of Witte (London: John Kingston, 1557).
 The Origins of the Culture of Mechanical Invention 355

of geometry and arithmetic flourished; . . . the citadels fortified, the

columns made, and pyramids and towers likewise, the bridges and arches
erected, ships built, harbours designed, engines of war manufactured,
theatres and temples and countless others of that frame worked o u t . . . " 2 8
It will be seen that not only was the mathematics in question essentially that
of antiquity, of Euclid, Diophantus, Archimedes, Pappus; but the prestige
of mathematics was enhanced by its tradition from Greco-Roman antiquity.
The most visible sign of that glorious past was its buildings, not only
temples like the Pantheon at Rome, the Maison Carr6e of Nimes or the
theatres, but also useful structures, often still in use after so many hundred
years--Roman bridges, aqueducts such as those at Segovia or the Pont du
Gard, or the traces of their harbours. (The nickname of the Maison Carr6e is
significant--the square house.) For when the humanist scholar or architect
of the Renaissance admired these relics of antiquity and sought to emulate
them, the feature that most impressed him was just this mathematical
simplicity, which everyone stressed when making comparisons with the
pinnacles and elaborate ornamentation of the flamboyant Gothic. It was
suggested that mathematical simplicity accounted not only for their elegant
uncluttered beauty, according to simple ratios of cosmic meaning, but also
for their massive strength, and so their permanence. These buildings were
constructed of pure semicircular arches, semicylindrical vaults,
hemispherical domes. Their facades were composed of triangular
pediments, rectangular metopes, cylindrical columns, fluted with simple
curves, as manifested in the oldest and purest of capitals, the Doric and
Ionic. Such geometrical aesthetics can be found, at least in Italy, in buildings
erected prior to the Renaissance, but it was undoubtedly this belief, which
found the greatest beauty and vigour in the simplest geometry and
arithmetical proportion, that inspired Leon Battista Alberti, for example, to
design a facade which looks almost like a set of geometrical diagrams to
mask the front of Santa Maria Novella at Florence, or a shell that covered
over the nasty medieval roughness of what was to be the Tempio
Malatestiano at Rimini.
Nevertheless, it was certainly not just the classical links of mathematics
which made this so central in the culture of the sixteenth century--more so
by far than in medieval Europe, or indeed in the Greco-Roman civilisation
which that of the Renaissance ostensibly emulated.

Artillery and the New Geometrical Style of Fortification

There were also many "objective" changes in the technology of the time
which led in the same direction. The development of artillery through the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries eventually transformed warfare, and was
to make mathematics an essential qualification for the military art. By the

28 Mizauld, A., De Rebus Mathematicis Hactenus Desideratis (Paris: Michael Vascosan,

1556), dedication.
356 Alexander Keller

last years of the fifteenth century, cannon had reached sufficient efficiency,
and perhaps more important, sufficient mobility on their gun-carriages, to
have become a decisive instrument of w a r . 29 That broke up still further the
old style of pitched battle--and pike and bow, both long-bow and the more
mechanical cross-bow, had in any case already shaken severely the old
supremacy of the armoured knight. But, much more, the old style of
fortification was manifestly of less and less use. The thin-skinned, high-
walled, high-towered castle of the Middle Ages had been intended to resist
scaling and storming. A new style had to evolve to answer the new military
technology of offence, a style which would offer less of a target to cannon
shot; and if hit would more easily absorb its impact. The many variants
which competed from the last quarter of the fifteenth century had in
common the requirement of providing a dominant position for artillery; the
careful use of geometrical design to lay out gun emplacements which offered
a minimal target to the besieger with maximal field of fire for the guns, which
had to cover one another from their bastions. So the low bastion replaced
the tower; the earthwork, in which shot might be buried, replaced the stone
wall, now kept primarily as a retaining skin, with ditches and moats to
prevent these more vulnerable walls from being scaled. Then sixteenth-
century wars became often more a matter of sieges, in which fortified towns,
being so much larger, outweighed castles. As each fortress was in a different
situation, the problem of the ideal geometrical design for that location had
to be worked out; the geometer tried to suggest methods of solving each
particular problem. Attacking armies grew in size to match the greater tasks
of the new art of siege, which demanded the maintenance of these armies in
harsh conditions. The development imposed a mathematical study of
questions of military logistics, of pay and transport and commissariat. When
the besieging army arrived in place, it too had to adopt a geometrical
strategy to place its own guns and lay out its trenches so as to reach the
curtain wall and bastions, protected by so many rear works and outworks.
For the ruling classes of continental Europe, it was then above all the new
art of war which obliged a gentleman to learn some geometry if he wanted to
keep his rightful place in the military service. Some fortification engineers
might be of humbler origins; mathematical talent could advance socially
through a military career, but most military men in the higher ranks appear
to have been of landed families, which had formerly supplied knights to
feudal armies. A substantial literature appeared from about 1530, with
approaching 100 titles before the end of the century, dealing with the new
military science, its fortification geometry and its logistics. 3~

29 Hale, J. R., Renaissance Fortification (London: Thames & Hudson, 1977); and War and
Society in the Age of the Renaissance (London: Fontana, 1985).
3o La Croix, H. de, "The Literature on Fortification in Renaissance Italy", Technology and
Culture, IV (Winter 1963), pp. 30-50.
 The Origins o f the Culture o f Mechanical Invention 357

Mathematics at Sea

In maritime countries, naval requirements were a good second. Indeed in

G r e a t Britain, where there was little danger of land warfare, and the sea was
regarded as the country's best barrier; they were much more important. 3t
The navigations of the Spanish and Portuguese in the last years of the
fifteenth century aroused envy among the French, Dutch and English. From
1502, the Spanish crown had its own school of pilotage linked to the Casa de
Contrataci6n and, from 1508, a chief pilot whose duty it was to examine
budding pilots for their theoretical knowledge and maintain the highest
standard in the mathematical art of navigation and in the production of maps
and charts. The navigator was expected to use more complex geometry than
the fortification engineer, as he had to translate the spherical geometry of the
sky to the plane of his chart, and establish his position in relation to a large
number of variables, not least the troublesome motion of his floating
platform. He must understand the use of compass, astrolabe, Jacob's staff,
and later the backstaff, and the nocturlabe. Hence anyone who wished to
exploit the voyages of others by the command of a ship to travel to distant
continents, and there grow rich by trade or piracy, had to familiarise himself
with these instruments. Here the literature was originally in Spanish or
Portuguese, but these books were soon translated, and then rivalled or
superseded by those in French, English and Dutch. In all the great ports of
Europe, mathematicians could find additional employment teaching
captains and sailors the use of globes and charts, the compass to find their
bearings, and how to shoot the sun to find the latitude. 32 Numerous ways
were also suggested to combine the observation of time from sun or night
sky, with a knowledge of predicted celestial events so as to find the longitude
too, although these methods all broke down in practice on the inadequacy of
their measurement of time.

The Surveyor's A r t

Thus on land and at sea, gentlemen discovered that the mathematical arts
could no longer be left to astrologers and a handful of enthusiasts. As
explanations for the increased study of geometry in the age of the
Renaissance, these motives could be treated as consequences of revolutions
in technology, of the gradual but none the less drastic impact of new
instruments of production--if we may call cannon instruments of
production. There were other social and economic changes, slower still,
more continuous with the developments that had been operating through
31 Waters, D.W., The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan Times (London: Hollis &
Carter, 1958);and Taylor, E. G. R., The Haven-FindingArt (London: Hollis & Carter, 1956).
32The Spanish, or at least Iberian, origins are discussed in Lopez Pifiero, J. M., Ciencia y
Tecnica en la Sociedad Espafiola de los Siglos XV1 y XVll (Barcelona: Labor Universitaria,
1979), pp. 196-212; see also, Taylor, E. G. R., op. cit. Nobody appears to have done for any
other country what Taylor does for the English mathematical navigators in The Mathematical
Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954).
358 Alexander Keller

the Middle Ages, which still demanded the surveyor's skills. Increasing
population encouraged drainage schemes in the Netherlands, northern
Italy, and later also in France and England. The need to reclaim land from
the deltas of Rhine, Maas and Po taught techniques which were not really
novelties, but were now practised on a wider scale. 33 Similarly, irrigation in
eastern Spain was based on the hydraulic regime of the Moors, which in turn
had been elaborated from a Roman or even pre-Roman heritage. 34 In
northern Italy and later in France, the watering of meadows for pasture led
to a different irrigation technology. Irrigation canals, if broad and deep
enough, could carry punts; if larger still, flat-bottomed barges. Sluices to
admit or retain water for irrigation could also admit it for the passage of
boats, and if close enough to one another could form pounds where water
levels could be controlled.
Increased population in the countryside and increased trade promoted
urban growth; growing cities needed water for drinking and industry. That
urban water supply has left its mark on the townscape of many European
cities in the shape of beautiful and elaborate Renaissance fountains,
sometimes the most striking monument locally of the sixteenth century. All
this civil engineering required taking the measurements of heights,
distances, areas, which led, inter alia, in the 1530s to the invention of
triangulation, in order to produce accurate local maps. In Apianus's
Instrumentbuch (1533), the author illustrated the use of a quadrant--like the
mariner's astrolabe, a simplified version of an instrument long in use among
astronomers--to check whether water could be taken from a certain
mountain spring to supply the fountain of a town square, and to show that it
could be done despite intervening high groundY All such projects gave
employment to surveyors, very often men who were also teachers of
mathematics, and sometimes military engineers in time of war. It may be
that the inflation of the sixteenth century, however modest by our standards,
disturbed a society unused to an apparently rapid decline in the value of gold
and silver, and so helped to persuade landowners that they should look into
the possibilities of rendering productive some land which their ancestors had
been prepared to leave as heath or bog; this gave another role to the
mathematical surveyor.
In northern Europe at least, an additional factor was provided by the
dissolution of monasteries, and in some areas further secularisation of
church land. Perhaps it is more than a curious coincidence that one of the
first books on surveying in England should be the work of a former monastic
steward, who may have profited by the suppression of his own house to

33 Harris, L. E., "Land Drainage and Reclamation", in Singer, C. et al. (eds.), A Historv of
Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), Vol. III, pp. 300-323.
34 Glick, T. F., Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press, 1970). These techniques are beautifully laid out in Garcia-Diego, J. A., (ed.), Los
Veintiun Libros de los Ingenios y de las Maquinas (Madrid: Ediciones Turner, 1983).
35 Apianus, P., Instrumentbuch (Ingostadt: 1533), Part III, ch. 13, sig. Fiii.
 The Origins of the Culture of Mechanical Invention 359

acquire one of its vicarages. 36 Those whose fortunes were based on these
suppressions had often had to invest some money in their acquisition and
naturally had good reason to try and make the most of their new possessions.
But in Catholic countries monasteries were among the most progressive--
that is commercially minded--of landowners, and in the sixteenth century
might form their own schemes for the improvement of land.
Whether these social, economic and political factors were in themselves
sufficient, it is hardly easy to assess. Certainly the mathematisation of art
and the mathematisation of architecture converged on the same end without
such matters weighing so obviously in the balance. Mathematicians were
keen to emphasise the utility of their studies and urged that mathematics
should not be despised because counting and measuring were so humdrum,
but rather that their necessity and economic value should oblige everyone to
learn mathematics. Surely the appearance of new translations of Euclid,
particularly the first six books of the Elements, and the new geometries like
the literature of fortification, navigation and surveying, support the
inference that someone was listening to them. 37 Of course, it would be
impossible to assess just what proportion read or studied even the
elementary material, still less what standards were attained, and by how
many. What evidence there is suggests that standards were not very high.

The Literature o f Mechanical Invention

Some mathematicians were also convinced that they could reform the
mechanical repertoire of their time by inventing new applications for the old
principles, or by designing a wide range of new types of old machines, such
as pumps, cranes and mills. This conviction provided the basis for a
manuscript literature of such inventions--with a particular taste for
destructive weapons of war--that started in early fifteenth-century
G e r m a n y and Italy; its greatest exponent by far was Leonardo da Vinci.
These manuscripts were often kept secret; they were regarded as of military
importance, and quite often the author used the manuscripts to win the
favour of some prince who, he hoped, would employ him as an engineer.
Some, like those of Francesco di Georgio, did circulate, but only among
their authors' peers.
The expansion of circulation to the general public was not achieved until
more than 100 years after the invention of printing, and it is reasonable to
associate the new genre of printed books of mechanical inventions with the
propaganda for applied mathematics described above. Whatever his

36 Richard Benese, author of the The Maner of Measurynge of all Manner of Lande
(Southwark: Nicholson, 1537?), is likely to be the rector of that name of Long Ditton, which
had been in the patronage of Merton Priory in Surrey, where he had been a canon before the
dissolution of the monasteries: Stephen, L. (ed.), Dictionary of National Biography (London:
Smith, Elder, 1885), Vol. IV, p. 218.
37 Thomas-Sanford, C., Early Editions of Euclid's Elements (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1926).
360 Alexander Keller

motives, the publication in 1571-72 of Jacques Besson's book of machines,

dedicated to King Charles IX of France, and in receipt of a royal subsidy to
aid its publication, is a milestone in this history. 38 Unlike many of his
predecessors, Besson was not selling secrets; he did not want to conceal but
rather to proclaim his inventions, which he had been hawking around
Switzerland for some years. His book is a series of plates of inventions. It
came out first with Latin captions, French, Latin and Italian commentaries
soon followed, then German and just after the end of the century Spanish,
and it is obvious from borrowings that copies also reached England, where
Besson died a refugee from the persecutions of Saint Bartholomew's Eve.
His book inspired two imitators: Jean Errard, a young engineer who later
became quite well known--but his later books are on more practical aspects
of geometry and fortification;39 and Agostino Ramelli, whose Diverse et
Artificiose Machine appeared in French and Italian in 1588.40 This
magnificent volume had its own followers and was much later translated into
German. Besson and Ramelli continued to enjoy a reputation through the
seventeenth century, and their inventions reappeared in later writers. It was
not until the work of Leupold in the eighteenth century, a work which adopts
the title and format of these "theatres of machines", that their inventions
were criticised and rejected. 41 Thereafter, this genre has often been treated
as not serious by technologists and historians of technology.
These inventions can be correctly dismissed as going against the laws of
dynamics, which were as yet unknown in the sixteenth century. Galileo, in
the process of establishing the foundations of classical dynamics, himself
attacked the pretensions of these ambitious engineers. In fact, many of
their inventions would have worked less well than devices already in
existence, from which they differed chiefly in greater complexity, which
risked greater friction-loss, and more chances that something would go
wrong. 42 They seem only too often to be ringing the changes on a few simple
ideas, and when an interesting new concept does manifest itself--for
instance, rotary pumps in Ramelli--there is seldom evidence that it was
realised in an actual model.
Practical men also condemned the intervention of mathematicians in
fortification and navigation, and claimed that the practical experience of
soldiers and sailors was much more useful than all these geometrical
theories. Similarly, the books of machines could be rejected on grounds of
experience. But their popularity for more than two or even three
38 Besson, J., Livre premier des instruments mathematiques et m~caniques . . . (Paris?:
1570-72); see also Keller, A., A Theatre of Machines (London: Chapman & Hall, 1964).
39 Errand, J., Le Premier livre des instruments mathdmatiques mechaniques (Nancy: Ian
Ianson, 1584).
40 Ramelli, A., Le Diverse et artifitiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli (Paris: 1588).
41 Leupold, Theatrum Machinarium Generale (Leipzig: 1724).
4z Such objections were indeed raised at the time by, e.g., Palissy, Bernard, Discours
admirable de la nature des eaux et fountaines (Paris: Le Jeune, 1587); Cap, P. A. (ed.), Oeuvres
completes de Bernard Palissy (Paris: Blanchard, 1961); and Blyth, Walter, England's Improver
Improved (London: John Wright, 1652), p. 40.
 The Origins o f the Culture o f Mechanical Invention 361

generations does suggest that they helped to form the climate of opinion in
which it was accepted that the mathematisation of all techniques would lead
to their indefinite improvement. Ramelli's preface sang the praises of
mathematics; he saw his inventions as showing the possibilities inherent
there, the fruit of the tree of mathematics, as L e o n a r d o - - s o m e of whose
drawings he might have seen--had already put it. 43

The Mechanical Inventor

The "culture" of mechanical invention was an outlook or state of mind of
the "mechanical inventor", who dreamt of transforming economy and society
with his creations. Perhaps the "mechanical inventor" is nowadays replaced
by a team and has lost his heroic reputation. Certainly "mechanical" now
matters less than chemical or electronic. Even in his best days, society at
times thought of the mechanical inventor as rather eccentric. But society did
concede his utility, and acknowledged that his inventions really had
transformed the conditions of human life and would continue to transform
them. This expectation of radical transformation through invention became
a popular idea in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and later. The
machine then became the model of explanation, as it was the model of
action, the method of solving any problem. These ideas started as unpopular
and dubious notions. The sixteenth-century advocates of applied
mathematics often did not find life easy. 44 They were trying to alter the
course of a culture, and although they were helped and perhaps inspired by
external changes, it was by no means obvious that they would find a welcome
for their claims for mathematics.
The mechanical-experimental philosophy of the 1650s and 1660s is a
success story. The advocates of the new philosophy could point to great new
discoveries. They were able to win social acceptance and state support. They
organised themselves into societies, and persuaded the larger community
that it would be necessary to recast ideas about almost everything. All the
same, neither the triumph of that philosophy, nor the triumph of the later
mechanical industrial revolution can be understood, without reference to the
preliminary work of the mathematicians and mechanicians who earlier
participated in the reform of mathematical education.

43 Ramelli, A., op. cir., Leonardo's celebrated epigram calls mechanics the paradise of
mathematics, "for with that [mechanics]one comes to the mathematical fruit": Richter, J. P.,
The Literary Works ofLeonardo da Vinci (London: Phaidon 1970)Vol. II, 241-section 1115,
from MS E 8b.
44 Tartaglia, N., La Travagliata lnventione (Venice: Bascarini, 1551), complains of the
difficulties he had with proposed courses in geometry.