Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
heavy plough, the shoulder and the tandem harness, the nailed horse-
shoe, and the three-field crop rotation system. Greater agricultural pro-
ductivity, as one would expect, soon led to a significant increase in
population, freeing up large numbers of peasants for urban, industrial
activity. Here, in this burgeoning technological milieu and time that we
moderns are so accustomed to writing off as an impractical age of cathe-
dral building and Scholasticism, capitalism began to germinate and the
mechanization of Western technology started to take hold. Not only did
the building of bigger and more durable ships in tandem with such inven-
tions as the lateen sail, the magnetic compass, and the astrolabe enable
the geographic discoveries and colonizations of early modernity; there
also arose a more systematic approach to technological innovation as
well as a new feeling for the natural world that, while not as aggressive
as modern technology, certainly was indicative, in retrospect, of a coming
change in attitude toward nature in the West.
As proof of such change, historians usually point to the large-scale uti-
lization of nonhuman power sources such as oxen and horses, water
and—with the invention of the windmill—wind power. These in their
own way provided an impetus for the development of machinery and
machine design in such areas as mining—with its use of geared wheels,
revolving fans and bellows, and the suction pump—and the woolen
industry—newly dependent on the spinning wheel, the horizontal
frameloom, and the fulling mill. But probably the most far-reaching
medieval inventions were the crank and the mechanical clock.
1
The crank
allowed for the translation of rotary into reciprocal motion and vice
versa, doubling, for example, the productivity of the spinning wheel,
according to Adam Smith; whereas the clock made possible the emer-
gence of a synchronized and disciplined workforce, not to mention the
objectivization of time into discretely measurable units that was to prove
so useful to modern physics and its mathematicization of nature. The
emergence of the metaphor of the clockwork universe as early as the
fourteenth century is clearly indebted to this technological development.
In sum, power machinery and an increasingly mechanical disposition of
nature were prevalent by the thirteen century; and by the fourteenth, the
population of Europe was comfortable in the presence of this machin-
ery, while the elites looked to it as central to emerging notions of mate-
rial and, later, scientific progress.
