Posts: 1,420 Location: New Orleans
Tue 04 Aug, 2020 9:00 am
I can't speak to this specific device but for context, I have few observations.
I think we should indeed be careful about these kinds of manuals, and at the same time not be too credulous but also not be too dismissive. In academia the tendency in the last 150 years or so is to err on the side of assuming it's all fantastical nonsense. I am
not an expert on Classical engineers but I do know that they were brilliant people whose seemingly fantastical ideas did come to fruition. Look at the
Antikythera mechanism. It may or may not have been made by Archimedes but
somebody back in his day conceived, designed and put that thing together and it represents technology far more advanced than we had ever given people in that time period, or for many many centuries later credit for achieving.
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When it comes to the late medieval and Early Modern kriegsbücher, starting with the Bellifortis and progressing through the likes of
philipp mönch and
Talhoffer, and the equivalent military engineering manuals ala
Taccola,
Giovanni Fontana etc., it's quite clear that they contain
both fantastical or theoretical concepts as well as quite real ones that were actually made and used in warfare, and the preponderance were of the latter variety. We still don't know what a lot of them actually are, but one by one tests and further research are revealing that they are in fact turning out to be real, viable designs and some have been hiding in plain sight so to speak for generations.
Guys like Heron and Archimedes, and
Ctesibius and
Philo of Byzantium and so on were genius mathematicians whose designs changed world history. An inflatable siege ladder doesn't make any sense to me on the face of it, but then again neither did the Zwerchau when I first read the
Zettel.
Just my $.02