Historical Note
- PDF / 2,175,829 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 576 x 777.6 pts Page_size
- 99 Downloads / 196 Views
The Great 16th-century Chroniclers of Pyrotechnology Go to any good technical library today and you will find an ocean of journals, monographs, proceedings, CD databases, manuals, and other sources loaded with protocols, practices, formulae, and procedures for virtually every industrial art. This plethora of information is all the more reason why last year's passing without at least some acknowledgment in the MRS Bulletin of the 500th anniversary of George Bauer's birth might fit into the genre of ungracious acts. Bauer, a physician in sixteenth-century Bohemia and Saxony (now areas of the Czech Republic and Slovakia and of Germany, respectively) is better known by historians as Georgius Agricola, a Latinized name probably given to him by his instructors. His achievement most important to today's materials community is that he was one of the very first to write a detailed and comprehensive chronicle of the practical arts, primarily mining and metallurgy. Various ancient writers had recorded bits and pieces on such topics much earlier. But none of these approached the comprehensiveness or currency of Agricola's most celebrated work De Re Metallica, which was first published in 1556, a year after the author's death. Besides mining and metallurgy, the treatise covers glassmaking, pottery, and the manufacture of salt, soda, potash, saltpeter (potassium nitrate), and other chemicals, which Agricola called "solidified juices." De Re Metallica, with dozens of beautiful and detailed woodcuts, went through 10 editions and several translations at a time when printing such a lavish book was a major undertaking. It remains one of the most important primary sources on Medieval and Renaissance technology for contemporary historians of technology. Interestingly, it was first translated into English in 1912 by none other than the engineer and U.S. President-to-be Herbert Hoover and his wife Lou Henry Hoover. The late Manhattan Project metallurgist and materials historian Cyril Smith pointed out that the Italian metallurgist and writer Vannoccio Biringuccio, who was born in 1480, was unjustly overshadowed by Agricola. In 1540, while Agricola was still working on De Re Metallica, Biringuccio's De La Pirotechnia, was published. Indeed, Smith goes so far as to say that in several places in De Re Metallica Agricola
verges on plagiarism. The relatively greater familiarity with Agricola compared with Biringuccio may be due to the former's more scholarly approach. His use of Latin would have naturally attracted the intelligentsia. Biringuccio wrote in the Italian vernacular to reach his technical audience. To be fair, De Re Metallica did include far better illustrations than De La Pirotechnia, and often provided more technical detail. Still, in his translation with Martha Teach Gnudi of Biringuccio's work, Smith credits Biringuccio's work with marking "the beginning of a true technological literature, with both craftsmanship and science united by a writer's pen to form a record of an important facet of man's achievement as a stimulus to
Data Loading...
