05-13-2008, 07:03 PM
Even Finley treated the DRB, as I recall it. It might not necessarily be in the mainstream lane, but it sure has been extensively treated by historians of the late roman period and definitely by the historians of technology.
I think you misunderstand a bit the points about science and engineering. Science is what in antiquity and the middle ages was called Natural Philosophy; theorethical science, the attempts at understanding the basic mechanics of the universe. Engineering in our contemporary world draws extensively on theorethical and applied science. In the ancient, medieval, early modern and even into the modern period, the two were more or less divided - engineering was much more tied in to the craftsman's experience and tradition than the natural philosopher's theoretic world. There was contact, of course, and some sharing of ideas, but not in the systematic way we see today. Hence, my example about the doctors vs the barber-surgeons until the 19th century - barber-surgeons were for example used in anatomical lectures in the high middle ages' Universities and for conducting postmortems - but they often provided the wetwork whereas the medical doctors provided the interpretations (although many barber-surgeons sure did know a thing or two about anatomy).
The Antikythera mechanism is sort of an example of the merger there: it weds astronomical/astrological natural philosophy with engineering, and it seems likely that the person who built must have had a pretty good understanding of both gearing and astronomy/astrology. That seems to be quite common, though - astronomical automata (typically on a much larger scale) appear every now and then in both the western, asian and islamic worlds thorough history. As mentioned, there was some contact between the two fields, but not like we see after the 19th century.
The problem with the history of engineering is that they didn't write all that much about it until relatively recently. Heron, Vitruvis, the Anonymous of the DRB, Al-Jazari, de Honnecourt, da Vigevano - their corpus is literally dwarfed by the theorethical natural philosophy texts.
[Don't get me wrong, I am not saying you don't know what Natural Philosophy was. I am just saying that the link between theorethical science, as we know it today, and practical engineering, again as we know it today, wasn't really that strong before recent times]
I think you misunderstand a bit the points about science and engineering. Science is what in antiquity and the middle ages was called Natural Philosophy; theorethical science, the attempts at understanding the basic mechanics of the universe. Engineering in our contemporary world draws extensively on theorethical and applied science. In the ancient, medieval, early modern and even into the modern period, the two were more or less divided - engineering was much more tied in to the craftsman's experience and tradition than the natural philosopher's theoretic world. There was contact, of course, and some sharing of ideas, but not in the systematic way we see today. Hence, my example about the doctors vs the barber-surgeons until the 19th century - barber-surgeons were for example used in anatomical lectures in the high middle ages' Universities and for conducting postmortems - but they often provided the wetwork whereas the medical doctors provided the interpretations (although many barber-surgeons sure did know a thing or two about anatomy).
The Antikythera mechanism is sort of an example of the merger there: it weds astronomical/astrological natural philosophy with engineering, and it seems likely that the person who built must have had a pretty good understanding of both gearing and astronomy/astrology. That seems to be quite common, though - astronomical automata (typically on a much larger scale) appear every now and then in both the western, asian and islamic worlds thorough history. As mentioned, there was some contact between the two fields, but not like we see after the 19th century.
The problem with the history of engineering is that they didn't write all that much about it until relatively recently. Heron, Vitruvis, the Anonymous of the DRB, Al-Jazari, de Honnecourt, da Vigevano - their corpus is literally dwarfed by the theorethical natural philosophy texts.
[Don't get me wrong, I am not saying you don't know what Natural Philosophy was. I am just saying that the link between theorethical science, as we know it today, and practical engineering, again as we know it today, wasn't really that strong before recent times]
