[ [56] André-Marie Ampère, Essai sur la philosophie des sciences, une exposition analytique d'une classification naturelle de toutes les connaissances humaines, 2 vols., Paris, 1838 (for origin of the project, see vol. 1, pp. v, xv).
Cinématique (from the Greek word for movement) was, according to Ampère, the science "in which movements are considered in themselves [independent of the forces which produce them], as we observe them in solid bodies all about us, and especially in the assemblages called machines."[57] Kinematics, as the study soon came to be known in English,[58] was one of the two branches of elementary mechanics, the other being statics.
[ [57] Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 51-52.
[ [58] Willis (op. cit. footnote 21) adopted the word "kinematics," and this Anglicization subsequently became the standard term for this branch of mechanics.
In his definition of kinematics, Ampère stated what the faculty of mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique, in Paris, had been groping toward since the school's opening some 40 years earlier. The study of mechanisms as an intellectual discipline most certainly had its origin on the left bank of the Seine, in this school spawned, as suggested by one French historian,[[59] by the great Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert.
[ [59] G. Pinet, Histoire de l'Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, 1887, pp. viii-ix. In their forthcoming book on kinematic synthesis, R. S. Hartenberg and J. Denavit will trace the germinal ideas of Jacob Leupold and Leonhard Euler of the 18th century.
Because the Ecole Polytechnique had such a far-reaching influence upon the point of view from which mechanisms were contemplated by scholars for nearly a century after the time of Watt, and by compilers of dictionaries of mechanical movements for an even longer time, it is well to look for a moment at the early work that was done there. If one is interested in origins, it might be profitable for him to investigate the military school in the ancient town of Mézières, about 150 miles northeast of Paris. It was here that Lazare Carnot, one of the principal founders of the Ecole Polytechnique, in 1783 published his essay on machines,[60] which was concerned, among other things, with showing the impossibility of "perpetual motion"; and it was from Mézières that Gaspard Monge and Jean Hachette[61] came to Paris to work out the system of mechanism classification that has come to be associated with the names of Lanz and Bétancourt.
[ [60] Lazare N. M. Carnot, Essai sur les machines en général, Mézières, 1783 (later published as Principes fondamentaux de l'equilibre et du mouvement, Paris, 1803).
[ [61] Biographical notices of Monge and Hachette appear in Encyclopaedia Britannica, ed. 11. See also L'Ecole Polytechnique, Livre du Centenaire, Paris, 1895, vol. 1, p. 11ff.
Gaspard Monge (1746-1818), who while a draftsman at Mézières originated the methods of descriptive geometry, came to the Ecole Polytechnique as professor of mathematics upon its founding in 1794, the second year of the French Republic. According to Jean Nicolas Pierre Hachette (1769-1834), who was junior to Monge in the department of descriptive geometry, Monge planned to give a two-months' course devoted to the elements of machines. Having barely gotten his department under way, however, Monge became involved in Napoleon's ambitious scientific mission to Egypt and, taking leave of his family and his students, embarked for the distant shores.