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76
at making it easier could only have been a temptation by the Devil. Scientists who
dared to find out some scientific truth – for instance, that the earth is not the centre of
the Universe– were made to recant, or burnt at the stake1 if they stuck to their
'heresies'.
Technical achievements do not appear out of the blue. Apart from the incentive
to the inventor and the possibility of putting his inventions to some practical use,
there is the development of craftmanship which plays a decisive part. For instance,
the invention of the steam-engine depended on a high standard of boiler-making,
which in turn meant that the craft of riveting had to be well developed. Or, to quote
another example: the main achievement of a Nuremberg locksmith who lived at the
beginning of the sixteenth century, was not that he 'invented the watch', as the
textbook tells us, but that he was able to produce springy strips of steel, elastic
enough to bend them tightly into coils. Anyone could have thought of making a
pocket model of a clock, but it was the craftmanship of the locksmith which provided
the essential part, the mainspring.
The frustration which an inventor must have felt when he discovered that the
technological development of his time was far behind his own flight of ideas can be
guessed from Leonardo da Vinci's famous notebooks. It was only late in the
eighteenth century, three hundred years after Leonardo's lifetime, that his manuscripts
became generally known; until then he had ranked as a great artist, but few had any
idea of his importance as ah engineer and inventor. From these five thousand pages
he emerges as a mechanical genius – but so far ahead of his time that most of his
inventions were impossible to execute with the technological means and the
craftmanship available around A. D. 1500. However, the notebooks seem to have
circulated among his contemporaries, and his ideas influenced many of them. It was
the time of the Renaissance, that is, of the revival of classic art and science, which
marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times. Medieval
society began to break up; a new class – that of the merchants – rose between the
upper and the lower classes, and stimulated inventive thought, exploration, and
expansion.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries numerous attempts were
made at utilizing the power of steam. It was an odd succession of scientists and
inventors who took up the idea every few years, now in this country, now in that: the
idea of using the expanding force of water, gasified by boiling, to drive some kind of
machine. There was a French architect whom Cardinal Richelieu sent to a madhouse
because of the 'lunacy' of his plans; there he died after thirty years of captivity. One
of his visitors at that dismal place was the Marquis of Worcester, himself a man with
an inventive mind, who was also to spend a number of years behind bars. He acted as
a secret agent of the exiled King Charles II until he was caught by Cromwell's men
and imprisoned in the Tower of London. There he compiled his famous Century of
Inventions, a collection of technical ideas, many of which were carried out long after
his time: telegraph, automatic pistol, airplane, stenography, shiplifting crane, light-
metal gun, megaphone, combination lock, horseless carriage, and sailless ship. Only
one of his inventions – No. 68 in the Century – reached the model stage during the
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