Today, the first handbooks. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about the
machines that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
I was still a teenager when I first
began to live out of a set of books about my chosen work
of engineering. Marks' Mechanical Engineering
Handbook, Dwight's Mathematical Tables, and
the like. Nowadays, sellers of old books look down upon
that literature and let the older versions fall into
decay. Yet America, with its lack of skilled craftsmen,
was built upon books of this ilk.
The handbook literature traces back to the early
fifteenth century. In some sense it even traces to the
notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Although Leonardo's
descriptions of machinery never reached print, they
probably influenced a new literary form called the
Theatre of New Machines. That title recurred for
almost two centuries after Leonardo.
A typical theatre of machines was a book heavily
illustrated with block prints. One of the earliest was
Jacques Besson's Book of Mathematical and Mechanical
Instruments, published in 1571. At first such books
said a lot about power generation and transmission. Four
centuries ago, the term mathematical instrument
might refer to a complex system of pulleys. Later it was
applied to astronomical, surveying, and timekeeping
The old books copied one another. Each new one took up
old ideas and added new ones. Not everything in the old
theatres of machines made sense -- not even ideas that
survived from one to the next. Take the clockwork mill: to grind
grain, Agostino Ramelli proposed using a huge
weight-driven clockwork mechanism. Unfortunately, a mere
boy was supposed to rewind the weight after it'd driven
the mill through a huge gear train.
The whole advantage of the water-driven mill was that it
generated a hundred times as much power as a human being.
Now one boy was supposed to replace that power. Still,
the folly of the idea seems almost worth it when we look
at his lovely complex woodcut!
Clockwork was a primal concept of that age, and we see it
again in Bartolemeo Scappi's spring-driven spit for
cooking meat. Here's one of the few period pictures of a
sixteenth-century watch mechanism. It's being used on a
heroic scale to turn three large spits at constant speed.
Much of this was blatant showing-off. Still, stirred in
among the flamboyance of machines that might or might not
work is a record of the machines that underlay
We see accurate representations of the new production of rag-based
paper, of a horizontal-water-wheel-driven
grain mill, of a cam-controlled copper
engraver's press, of a medieval fire engine.
These were the forebears of the handbooks that guided me
through a lifetime of engineering. My Marks'
Handbook is dated 1951 -- the year I finished
college. It has over twenty-two hundred pages of compact
information that I still reach for now and then -- for
its graphs, illustrations, charts, tables. One day,
twenty-fifth-century historians will turn to their three
surviving copies to learn just how our world was made,
five hundred years before.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where
we're interested in the way inventive minds work.