TITLE:
Bernard Forest de Bélidor: Engineer, Manualist and Machine Historian
AUTHORS:
Luigi Traetta
KEYWORDS:
Bernard Forest de Bélidor, History of Machines, History of Hydraulic Technology
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Historical Studies,
Vol.9 No.2,
June
30,
2020
ABSTRACT: The establishment of
mechanical engineering during the Industrial Revolution produced, among other
things, the birth of technical manuals, accompanied by a significant increase
in historical studies of the machines of the past. This article examines the
work of Bernard Forest de Bélidor (1698-1761) in the light of current
historiographic trends, which, on the one hand, identify the Renaissance as the
period of the encounter between science and technology and, on the other,
highlight the lack of descriptive documents on the machines of time. A solider,
mathematician and member of several scientific academies, Bélidor is one of the
very few historians of Renaissance machines, as well as an engineer in the most
modern sense of the term and a precise model designer. In the manuals written
for his lectures at the French School of Artillery, he also proved capable of a
courageous attempt to apply Newtonian mathematics and physics to machines,
anticipating by half a century the process of scientication of technology that
would later ratify the birth of rational mechanics.