Pacey, Gunpowder as a tool of empires: 1450-1700
Background | argument | case | orgins & use of ballistics | dates | conclusion
Background: how the authors sustain one another's arguments?
| aspects | What or Where | related ideas and concepts |
|---|---|---|
| technical | Asian gunpowder, windmills, compass, paper & printing | China material hearth or dispersal center, Pacey |
| socio- | innovative organization | Pursell’s four stages |
| ideo- | Domestication of space | and time with clocks |
(agriculture) |
(fine technology) |
Asia and the slow diffusion of technical systems westward thanks to the Arabs.
Technical advances in "seeing," conceptualizing, and painting the world.
The clock
The printing press and the compass
Telescopes --lenses of glass, spaced at effective intervals
The Cartesian coordinate system, or "x" & "y" coordinates, systematized geometry Brunelleschi, Renaissance & perspective painting
Ballistics and the work of Niccolò Tartaglia for seige works & siting of bombardment guns.
Techniques used by Maurice of Nassau for the uses of guns: drill, small brigades, &defensive equipment.
Content:
1. Origins of innovation in Asia & America: two worlds apart
1.1 comparison survival technology & population
1.2 contrasts “fine technology" for clocks
2. Voyages of trade & rediscovery 1400-1790, ships are a small example of a tool complex because of the necessity of timber, pitch, tar, ropes, pulleys, fine technology [in the shape of compasses, sextants and logs] barrels, rigging and sails.
Case:
3. Transfer of novel tool complexes
3.1 paper making (Pacey, p. 42)
3.2 gunpowder, 1150, 1367, 1450, 1492
3.3 the three masted ship originated in ?
What good is gunpowder without a means of delivery to a target?
Ballistics was based on the practice and then knowledge of aiming artillery, later based on algebra before calculus was common in the 1680s and 1690s.
Dates and sounds
Key dates & words:
1150 use of explosive powder technology transfer east to west
1280 climatic disruption dialogue
1350 bubonic plague population decline & change
1445 Gutenberg in Mainz fine technology
1453 Constantinople fell catalyst since refugees fled west
1492 Columbus 1st voyage navigational tool complex: compass, sextant.
1514 The Turksih army with muskets & cannons destroyed the Persian Army 1517 Martin Luther’s theses ideo-technical changes: Reformation
1537 Niccolò Tartaglia's text on the "science of artillery."
1609 telescope (Netherlands) social & organizational resistance
New concepts:
• Geometry of projectiles formed a parabolic path
• Although heavy guns were often fired for maximum destructive effect at point blank range (with the barrel horizontal), greater range could be achieved by elevating the gun. Quadrants, sights and levels enabled the gunner to set the barrel at specified elevations.
• The question of determining the correct elevation necessary to fire a shot a given distance (and its inverse, the prediction of range at a given elevation) was the most taxing problem of gunnery as a mathematical art.
• Tartaglia set the terms of the debate by seeking to portray the geometry of a projectile's trajectory based on the opposed natural and violent motions of Aristotelian physics. His work provided the basis for many subsequent accounts in textbooks and manuals.
• Galileo offered a new foundation in his Discorsi of 1638, demonstrating the parabolic path of projectiles and reinforcing the military relevance of his work with a complete table of ranges.
• timeline as a measure of growing precision, performance and rates of diffusion for new inventions.
• absolute necessity of a dialogue in technology transfer
“technology transfer” i.e. reciprocating motion into rotary motion
• blocks in technological innovation due to any of the three aspects or spheres
“bottlenecks” as obstacles or opportunities?
Some examples of bottlenecks are widespread availability of digital television or electical and natural gas powered vehicles.
In the following chapter, as a consequence of guns, Pacey notes that:
• regimentation and manufacture arose side by side as a synergistic process where the means to a strategic outcome depended on techniques and not merely possession of superior tools.
"Such reorgainzation could involve training the the operator in more efficient ways, or dividing the task between several people."
p. 98.
Any machinery requires a certain level of skill and thus the user's performance enhancement required training, more than in previous use of tools, the machine demanded an upgrading of the operator's behavior, intelligence and skills.
• The standardization of space in that artists and ballistics used a similar rationale:
The employment of a common language and reasonable schematic to frame objects at a distance and this to understand extemsion in space as an objective and not only a subjective experience changed society and how subsequent culture's understood the world.
These new tools and techniques coincided with the rise of:
secularism, commercialism, rationalism, mechanization, atomistic philosophy produced such tensions in the agrarian based power structure of the Middle Ages and feudalism that a new order emerged in the cities of Italy, Flanders, and the Netherlands that was to challenge both the church and military power based in part on what sectors could acquire the new tools and with sufficient skills to employ them in commerce and warfare.
The Reformation is as much a technical achievement in the redesign of technology from three aspects as it is a spiritual reconstruction of Christendom. Printing, guns, clocks and books, were just some of the tools that made for a successful change in Europe's religions.
It was at once a war of liberation and a revolution in authority furthered by a technological sophistication of immense proportions.
This innovative process is called “the great titration!”
The great titration
List the contributions of each center of cultural diffusion:
| Europe | Asia | Africa | Americas |
|---|---|---|---|
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titrate: to test a known mass by measuring volumetrically the precise amounts of different substances contributing bulk to a compound substance. The purpose of this titration is to measure the exact amount of a solution needed to produce a certain reaction.
i.e. ammonium nitrate (fertilizer ) needed to create an explosive device (bomb).
"In one instance after another in Europe at this time, we find people analyzing how individual machines were operated, including musket's, surveying equipment, and spinning wheels."
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| Tools of Toil: what to read. | ||
| Tools are historical building blocks of technology. | ||
