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  • The Machines of Leonardo da Vinci and Franz Reuleaux: Kinematics of Machines from the Renaissance to the 20th Century
  • Alexander G. Keller (bio)
The Machines of Leonardo da Vinci and Franz Reuleaux: Kinematics of Machines from the Renaissance to the 20th Century. By Francis C. Moon. New York: Springer-Verlag, 2007. Pp. xxxi+416. $99.

“Ah the Machine; both coveted and criticised, life sustaining and life destroying yet always a symbol of human creativity and invention from the Renaissance to robotics, from the Wright brothers to the Wankel engine,” declares Francis Moon in his preface. Clearly he feels that in this age of information and electronic technologies we have tended to ignore how our complex society still very often makes use of simple mechanical components whose origins can be traced back to medieval craftsmen, or even further back. Putting Leonardo da Vinci next to Reuleaux, the classic theoretician of applied mechanics and mechanisms who flourished four centuries [End Page 454] later, may seem an odd combination. But Moon argues plausibly that Leonardo’s Codex Madrid I was the draft of a comprehensive study of mechanisms of the kind that Reuleaux was to produce in his time. The subtitle indeed insists that Reuleaux’s kinematics of machines held for the century just past, and implicitly for our own time too. So does Moon very much regret that “kinematics of machines as a formal subject is not widely taught today, especially in North America”—so that “the roots of this knowledge . . . are slowly becoming ‘lost knowledge,’” however important for the actual work of design (p. 239).

It is for those who now engage in engineering teaching to judge whether this is too pessimistic, or indeed whether it matters if this knowledge should be of historic interest only. Certainly this is an interesting book, rich in information. There is a degree of association of ideas, it is true, as Moon tries to be comprehensive. His study seems to have begun with Reuleaux, about whom he has already written, in large part inspired by the collection of Reuleaux models of mechanisms at Cornell University. Just as Reuleaux himself acknowledged his predecessors, Moon was encouraged to look at all those who wrote on these issues over the four centuries between his two protagonists, and to show how methods of machine design became more analytical and mathematically sophisticated, even if the elementary couples and linkages remained.

On the way we have some fascinating thoughts on our “visual kinematic perception of mechanisms”—how our brains perceive and can identify the moving parts of animate creatures, like ourselves, and can therefore perhaps see how some parts, some movements can be used in a mechanical train to replace human action. There is a section on the early history of clocks and automata, others on flight, on James Watt and the steam engine, and on the “theaters of machines” which first publicized the potential of mechanisms to ease our life, not to mention biographical data on Reuleaux, his contemporaries, and his predecessors. However, in all these short sections there are considerable gaps. Much of the information comes necessarily from secondary sources, sometimes as summarized in more general books. It is at least curious that no Technology and Culture articles are cited later than the 1960s.

At the end, just after Moon’s detailed comparison of mechanisms as portrayed and described by Leonardo and Reuleaux, the book includes a dozen plates of Cornell’s Reuleaux models. The main bibliography is very impressive but does not distinguish between original sources and secondary studies. However we may admire the pioneering work of William Barclay Parsons or Bertrand Gille, there have been many more recent advances in our knowledge of this history. We even have four more specialized bibliographies, which do at times overlap with the main one. Perhaps a reviewer should also note the problems created by publishing and printing a book in a country where the mother tongue is not the language in which the book [End Page 455] is written. Proofreading has been haphazard; there are far too many slips in the spelling—on one occasion, the medieval inventor Taccola is spelled “Taccola” and “Taccolo” in the same line...

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