Figure 8.—The Waterworks at Marly-le-Roi, on the Seine River, Built in 1684 to Supply the Fountains at the Royal Palace at Versailles. From a print by de Fer, 1705. (Smithsonian photo 45593.)
A comparison of the techniques described by Agricola with those of a century later suggests that this was a century of significant progress in that earlier industrial revolution described by Mumford as his “Eotechnic phase,” characterized by “the diminished use of human beings as prime movers, and the separation of the production of energy from its application and immediate control.”[23]
Footnotes:
[1] W. B. Parsons, Engineers and engineering in the Renaissance, Baltimore, 1939. Abraham Wolf, A history of science, technology, and philosophy in the 16th and 17th centuries, New York, 1935; and A history of science, technology and philosophy in the eighteenth century, London, 1938. C. M. Bromehead, “Mining and quarrying to the seventeenth century,” in Charles Singer and others, A history of technology, vol. 2, Oxford, 1956.
[2] According to Parsons (op. cit., footnote 1, p. 629) the introduction of machinery worked by animals and falling water, “radical improvements” of the 15th century, fixed the development of the art “until the eighteenth, and, in some respects, even well into the nineteenth century.” Wolf in his History of science ... in the eighteenth century (p. 629, see footnote 1) agrees, saying that “apart from [the steam engine] mining methods remained [during the 18th century] essentially similar to those described in Agricola’s De re metallica.” Bromehead (op. cit., footnote 1, p. 22), in referring to the date 1673 also sees “no appreciable change in methods of mining since Agricola.”
[3] Parsons, op. cit. (footnote 1), p. 179. T. A. Rickard, Man and metals, New York, 1932, vol. 2, pp. 519-521.
[4] Heinrich Bechtel, Wirtschaftstil des deutschen Spätmittelalters, Munich, 1930, pp. 202-203. Bechtel calls this one of the most revolutionary industrial developments of the middle ages.
[5] Rickard (op. cit., footnote 3, pp. 547-554, 561) also speaks of a decline through the exhaustion of surface deposits, but dates the revival 1480-1570. He supports this conclusion by statistics on the leading mine at Rammelsberg, which was unproductive from the Black Death (1347) to 1450, and only slightly active before 1518.
[6] According to F. M. Feldhaus (Die Technik, Leipzig and Berlin, 1914, p. 833.), a manuscript illustration of this type of pump, which he calls Schöpfkolbenkette, appears in the Mariano Codex latinus 197, B. 180, dated 1438, in the Munich Hofbibliothek.