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When Engineers Were Humanists
- einpoklum 6y agoThere is no new knowledge, simply a continual and sublime recapitulation. --Yorge, 'Name of the Rose'
- mlindner 6y agoDuring the Renaissance the "engineers" were aristocrats/nobles with money to spare to spend on trivial pursuits like innovation.
- drewcoo 6y agoNo, or it likely would not have been called the renaissance. It would have been the "oh, so very much darker ages" because it would have meant that patronage stopped. The aristocrats were the patrons. Patrons are the ones who have money to spare. Before that era, in that era, today, and for whatever tomorrows we have.
- mlindner 6y agoPatrons were just the mideival era venture capitalists. But they did it because they had engineering interest themselves.
- mcguire 6y agoVenture capitalists are the modern version of medieval patrons---they have money to spend to make themselves look intelligent and forward-thinking through the activities of others.
- Ericson2314 6y agoI thought yhat was more the 17th — 19th centuries, and that in the Renaissance the aristocracy was still happy being landed do-nothings and the new bourgeois was driving things. On the other hand, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe
- mlindner 6y agoTycho wasn't the only one, there's a few others but I forget their names.
- jhbadger 6y agoThere's a great book called "Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science" by Richard Holmes that is about the period between Newton and Darwin in which science and art were mixed -- you had poets like Coleridge who were amateur chemists (no, he wasn't making his own drugs, to spare the obvious joke given his habits), and chemists like Humphrey Davy who were amateur poets.
- mcguire 6y agoJohannes Kepler was apparently the son of a mercenary who disappeared when he was young and an innkeeper's daughter. Leonardo was the illegitimate son of a legal notary and a peasant. Brunelleschi was the son of another notary. Sebastien de Vaubon was the son of minor, broke nobility whose first position was for Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Conde. Quite a few of the famous in the Renaissance lived by patronage from the aristocracy, but were not themselves wealthy or powerful.
- rsj_hn 6y agoYes, this stereotype of innovation or invention being driven by rich dilletantes is absolutely false, and comes from a marxian historical analysis where the adherents didn't want to acknowledge that drivers of innovation for the most part were from the same background as, uhh, Marx himself, rather than from the nobility. It is also a dismissive attitude of the incredible obstacles that scientists and inventors had to overcome as they tinkered in garages, rising before dawn to conduct controlled experiments on plots rented with money that should have gone to pay for necessessities, spent family savings on acquiring books, and devoted their lives to improving the human condition, merely to brand them as dilletantes who never had to work for a living. Sure, wealthy aristocrats were over-represented but were a minority among the ranks of famous engineers and scientists. Most were of modest means, the sons of schoolteachers, reverends, carpenters, iron mongers, small shopkeepers, etc. Innovation is the child of the bourgeoisie. * George Green (1790s-1840s), of Green's theorem fame, grew up in modest circumstances -- his father was a baker and he worked at the bakery when he was young in order to support himself. * Benjamin Franklin (1700s-1790s) grew up in a family with modest means -- his parents could only afford 2 years of schooling and he worked on various odd jobs to support himself before achieving fame. * C. F. Gauss (1770s-1855) - perhaps the greatest mathematician of all time -- was born to poor, working class parents. His mother was illiterate and the date of his birth wasn't even recorded. * Isaac Barrow (1630s-1670s) -- was born into a middle class family, the son of a linen draper. * Isaac Newton (1640s-1720s) -- his father became wealthy but then spent all the money and died before Newton was born. His mother had to give him away to his grandmother and when she died Newton lived with the family of an apothecary. Unfortunately he was passed around. Newton did attend some elite schools but he did so on scholarship. * Thomas Newcomen (1660s-1720s) - inventor of the first successful steam engine -- was an iron monger and lay preacher, as well as an elder in a baptist church. * Bartolomeo Cristofori (1650s-1730s) - inventor of the piano -- was a commoner who grew up in obscurity, worked for luthiers, and got his big break when he was hired to fix the musical instruments of the Medici family. * John Shore (1660s – 1750s) - inventor of the tuning fork - was a professional trumpet player * Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1680s-1740s) - famous physicist and inventor -- worked as a merchant in Holland - as bourgeoisie as it gets! * John Kay (1700s-1770s) - inventor of the flying shuttle which helped kickstart the British textile revolution - came was the son of yeoman farmer, and apprenticed with a hand loom reed maker. * Pieter van Musschenbroek (1690s-1760s) - one of the co-inventors of the Leiden jar -- was the son of an instrument maker. * John Campbell, (1720s-1790s) - inventor of the sextant - was the son of a minister, and worked as an apprentice to a coastal vessel, then enrolled in the Navy, then was promoted to master's mate. * John Dolland (1700s-1761) - inventor of the chromatic lense - was the son of a silk-weaver and worked as an optician. * John Harrison (1690s-1770s) - inventor of the marine chronometer -- was the son of a carpenter and had no formal schooling. He also worked as a choirmaster. * James Hargreaves (1720-1778) - inventor of the Spinning Jenny - was the son of an illiterate hand-loom weaver, and himself worked as a weaver and a carpenter * Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) - scientist, natural philosopher, inventor (of carbonated water), discoverer of Oxygen, theologian, and author of over 150 books, was born to a large family of cloth finishers. He was also passed around to relatives. He worked all his life as a schoolteacher. * Richard Arkwright (1730s-1790s) - developer of the spinning frame and pioneer of the industrial revolution - was the son of a tailor (although he died a Queen's knight). His parents could not afford to send him to school so he was tutored by his cousin. * James Watt (1730s-1810s) - inventor and industrial age pioneer -- was the son of a shipwright and ship owner. He worked in his father's shipwrights. * Samuel Crompton (1750s-1820s) - inventor of the spinning mule - was the son of a groundskeeper. His father died, when Crompton was a young and spin yarn to make up for the lost income, and that experience led him to develop the mule, which he worked on secretly at night. * Henry Cort (1740s-1800s) - inventor of the steel roller and many other iron refining innovations - while there are no records of his birth or family, he first appears working for the Royal Navy as a paymaster. * Andrew Meikle (1710s-1810s) - inventor of the threshing machine and contributor to the Rotherham Plough, he helped spark tha British agricultural revoluion. He worked as a millwright. * John Fitch (1740s-1790s) - inventor of the steamboat - received little formal schooling, the occupation of his parents is unknown but he worked as an apprentice to a clockmaker.
- keiferski 6y agoNo, actually it was more often the opposite. Da Vinci, for example, is remembered more as an artist, but he was actually employed as an “engineer” for much of his life by military and civic leaders.
- jswizzy 6y agoGive it five years and you can change the title to When Engineers were Nihilists. "The ironic fact here is that humanism, which began with Man’s being central, eventually had no real meaning for people."
- float4 6y agoI very much disagree with that quote, so I had to look it up. It comes from a theologian/pastor who then goes on to talk about why God and the Bible are at the core of human dignity. Colour me shocked that a pastor criticises a largely non-religious philosophy.
- jonnypotty 6y agoHumanism replaces faith in God with faith in humans. It professed to free us from religion as we were told we don't need a God in order to make decisions. The fact that we never had a God to help us make decisions seems to go unnoticed.
- shmageggy 6y agoIs there a link to a non-paywalled version?
- DennisP 6y ago> have all your horses shod backward This would work only if the enemy knew nothing about tracking. Real trackers don't just look at the shape of the whole track, they look at things like which direction the dirt was pushed as the foot lifted off.