Both these goals are carried out by propositions arising from matter itself and artificial structures and instruments.And thus it is necessary to consider this subject in two manners: one that regards theory and the application of reason to things that must be done, making use of arithmetic and geometry, astrology, and natural philosophy; the other that is carried out in practice and requiring activity and manual labor, utilizing architecture, painting, design, the arts of the builder and carpenter and mason and related crafts, and in such a way that these things become intertwined and are a mixture of natural philosophy, mathematics, and the practical arts.So that whoever is instructed by clever men and has learned from childhood the previously mentioned sciences and can also design and work with his hands may become a skilled mechanic, inventor, and maker of marvelous works.
This knowledge includes infinite things of use to men in war and peace; it is useful to cities, farms, and commerce; medicine takes from it the devices for restoring broken and dislocated bones to their places.Thus Oribasius in his book on machines includes many instruments taken from mechanics and converted to medical uses, as the tripaston of Archimedes.The art of navigation receives other aids, such as the rudder which, placed behind or beside the vessel, moves and guides it easily, though it is very small with respect to the whole vessel; oars, which like levers drive it forward; and masts and sails.Windmills, watermills, mills turned by living beings, wagons, plows, and other farm devices are reducible to mechanics.So are the weighing of things with balances, the drawing of water from wells by pulleys or by cranes, called in Latin tollenones, which are like huge balances.The manner of conducting water and raising it from deep valleys to heights is similarly derived.The ancients called those persons mechanics also who produced miraculous effects by means of wind, water, or ropes- such as various sounds, or songs of angels, and even the expression of words as by human voices; and those who made clocks which were run by wheels or by water or which measured time by means of the sun and distinguished the hours.Mechanics are those who make celestial spheres showing the various heavens and the movements of the planets and other heavenly bodies like a miniature universe, by the equal movement in rotation given by water power, as we are told was done by Archimedes of Syracuse, the first master.But the moving of very great weights with small force by means of diverse instruments and devices is the chief function of mechanics; thus do balances, steelyards levers, pulleys, wedges, mills, gears and smooth wheels, all sorts of screws, mangles, windlasses, augers, and many other things involving these.According to Aristotle, all these things reduce to the lever, the circle, and the round framework, which moves the more rapidly the larger it is.
The art of fortification of palaces and places, and of defending them, [an art] which may be called military architecture, is a mechanical profession, for with bastions and barricades and other defenses a man with few soldiers essays to repel many by means of machines and instruments and to maintain his advantage.Furthermore, the fabrication and operation of warlike instruments is the special province of this science, as, for example, catapults and slings and the like, which hurl fire and stones and masses of iron weighing 250 pounds to a great distance (as much as 300 paces, according to Silius and Vitruvius) with ruinous force; arrows and bolts as large as beams things that strike with damage nearby, such as rams, crowbars and sledges; maritime devices such as grappling hooks and rope ladders, bridges, floating towers, and similar ancient devices.These in turn have been replaced by artillery, which, causing frightful damage by means of a small amount of incendiary material, is itself governed by mechanical considerations.
This science, which embraces innumerable other uses, both pleasing and necessary to men, has in other times existed in various states of development in the hands of its practitioners.To begin with, in distant ages past, before the Trojan War, Dedalus of Athens was a great master mechanic; he was first to invent the saw and axe, the plumb line, the auger, the mast, sailyard, and sail, and other things; he designed the intricate Cretan labyrinth, and ultimately he tried to make himself and his son two pairs of wings, by which they might traverse the air like angels, as the poets sing.
One may believe that, in erecting the temple of Solomon, the greatest as to size, mastery of architecture, and ornamentation of any that has ever been made, and in constructing the pyramids and many other edifices of ancient times that have filled the world with amazement, excellent mechanics took part, raising on high immense stones and [doing] other things that such men attempt.Later came Eudoxus and Archytas, both worthy engineers.Of Archytas, we read that he made a wooden dove so masterfully adjusted and inflated that it flew through the air like a real dove.These men in turn were followed by Aristotle the philosopher, who propounded in writing a few very elegant questions of mechanics.Then came Demetrius the king, called the taker or destroyer of cities, because he made machines and devices by which he could descend on them from above and capture them.Perhaps these were similar to the machine called the Trojan Horse, which enabled the Greeks to take Troy, for Pausanias in his Attica says that he considers it madness to believe that this was really a horse, and not a machine designed to assault city walls and capture the city.It was this king who first raised mechanics to a degree of honor.
Archimedes, who was the best of all craftsmen up to his time in this profession and who is like a light that has since illuminated the whole world, brought the reputation of mechanics to a peak from the poor and vile art it had been (as Plutarch tells us in his life of Marcellus) and caused it to be numbered with the most noble and prized military arts.For when Marcellus attacked Syracuse by sea and by land with great Roman armies, Archimedes, by various machines and ingenuities, always repelled the forces, to their great shame and damage, as Livy, Plutarch, and others have narrated at length, naming his devices.And when Marcellus sailed near the walls to attack them with rams, good Archimedes with his derricks and iron claws lifted the ships into the air, releasing them to drop into the sea and sink, treating many ships thus, until the navies held back from approaching the walls.Nor did he cease to plague the enemy with this, but, as Galen notes in the third book of his Temperaments, and Giovanni Zonara and Tzetzes confirm, citing Diodorus and Dionysus, he built certain large concave mirrors in the right proportion for the distances of those ships from the walls, and, exposing these to the direct rays of the sun, he set the [ships] afire, as if miraculously.And when armies attacked by land, he struck them with other devices, so that neither at sea nor on land could the foe shield himself from the cleverness of that excellent mechanic, new defenses and terrible offenses forever appearing.Pappus of Alexandria cites the fortieth device of Archimedes, to show that his inventions numbered at least forty.Marcellus, seeing that nothing was to be gained by his attempted assaults and that his men were being exposed to danger simply by the existence of that valorous old man, came to share the opinion of his whole army that the defense of Syracuse was governed by divine power.Hence he changed the course of his warfare turning it into a siege and strictly preventing any foodstuffs from entering the city.