HISTORY OF SCIENCE #7: MEDIEVAL TECHNOLOGY

Ancient Rome
- great engineers, poor inventors
- use of water-power delayed by use of slaves
- but one water wheel could mill 40 times as much flour as two humans powering mill

China - Han Dynasty
- great inventors, bad entrepreneurs
- invented:
          paper
          silk-weaving
          crank
          clock-work
          spinning wheel and horizontal loom

BUT
- large bureaucracy, strong government
- controlled irrigation, mail-service, roads, metal manufactures, lacquered goods
- few opportunities for people to better themselves as entrepreneurs, inventors

Ancient Rome
- strong central government
- state, technology geared to Rome, aristocrats
- slave labour depressed wages
- poorly-paid workers mean no mass markets

THE DARK AGES 450-1100 A.D.
Constantinople capital of Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire 330-1430 A.D.
- kept alive classical traditions
- isolated from West by Cyrillic alphabet, Greek
In West: Rome fell to Barbarian hordes c. 450
     - seat of Catholic Church
     - Church kept alive bits of classical culture
     - monasteries sites of learning, copying texts
     - Latin used by all educated people
- Population slashed by war and plague
- Roads, communications failed
- forests grew over cultivated land
- survival took most people's full energy

THREE INVENTIONS MADE THINGS GET BETTER
     - mouldboard plough - turned earth better
     - horse-collar - modified camel harness
     - horse-shoe
These inventions re-based agriculture on horsepower, increased productivity

MEDIEVAL EUROPE
- short on man-power
- used other sources of power where possible
- water-wheels, later wind-mills

MEDIEVAL WATER AND WIND MILLS
- more industrial applications possible due to:
     CAM
     CRANK
- used for sawmills, crushing ore, trip-hammers, driving bellows for forging, wine-presses,           tanning, spinning, fulling, pressing coins etc.

ISLAMIC TECHNOLOGIES 700-1200 A.D.
- clockwork, astrolabes, automata (automated toys, figures), fountains
- written about by al-Jazari 1206, Banu Musa brothers 850 A.D.
- excelled at complex machinery for "clockwork", automata
- but used CLEPSYDRA (water clocks), sundials

MECHANICAL CLOCK
- European invention based on Islamic clockwork technology
- Benedictine community kept "canonical hours" for prayer around the clock
- attached clockwork alarm to clepsydra for night prayers 1100s
- clockwork alarm became prototype for first mechanical clock around 1288

EFFECTS OF MECHANICAL CLOCK
- public time-keeping
- private time-discipline
- standard hour lengths
- regulation of worker-productivity
- move away from natural time-signals, thus away from nature by town-dwellers
- standard time essential to science