1434 (22 page)

A Chinese chain pump from the
Nung Shu
.

Di Giorgio's chain pump is a copy of Taccola's and almost identical to the Chinese illustration.

In my opinion di Giorgio started with the animal-powered machines shown in the
Nung Shu,
which he copied. He then copied from
Nung Shu
the basic Chinese water-powered machines using horizontal and vertical waterwheels. Next he adapted the horizontal and vertical waterwheels of the
Nung Shu
to power a whole range of mills and pumps—just as Galluzzi describes.

He did this by using the basic principles shown in the
Nung Shu,
that is, converting water power from horizontal to vertical through enmeshing gear wheels. Francesco changed power ratios through different sizes of gear wheels and also changed direction through cam shafts and rocker bearings so as to devise an array of water-and animal-powered sawmills and all manner of pumping systems.
²⁸

Galluzzi successfully summarizes Francesco's adaptations; Francesco himself says, “From these we can easily derive the others.”

Leonardo da Vinci Develops Francesco di Giorgio's Machines

In
The Art of Invention
Galluzzi reevaluates Leonardo's place in light of the earlier work of Taccola and di Giorgio:

“Leonardo ceases to be a visionary prophet in the desert. Rather he appears as the man who most eloquently expressed—both with words and above all images—the utopian vision about the practical potential of technology that were enthusiastically shared by many ‘artist engineers' of the fifteenth century.”
²⁹

Leonardo no longer appears as the iconic, singular genius. Instead, as Galluzzi writes, he “emerges as the culmination, as the most mature and original product of a collective development lasting several decades to which many highly talented figures made sizable contributions.”
³⁰

I believe Leonardo's machines were superbly illustrated copies and improvements of di Giorgio's. He brought his brilliant and incisive mind to penetrate the essentials of these machines, which he regarded not as magic creations deposited from heaven but as assemblages of parts. According to Galluzzi, he was able to perceive that an infinite variety of machines could be derived from a finite number of mechanisms, which he defines as “elements of machines.” As Galluzzi writes, his vision of the anatomy of machines and man was enshrined in a series of masterly drawings that mark the birth of modern scientific illustration.

By comparing Leonardo's drawings with the
Nung Shu,
we have verified that each element of a machine superbly illustrated by Leonardo had previously been illustrated by the Chinese in a much simpler manual.

In summary, Leonardo's body of work rested on a vast foundation of work previously done by others. His mechanical drawings of flour and roller mills, water mills and sawmills, pile drivers, weight-transporting machines, all kinds of winders and cranes, mechanized cars, pumps, water-lifting devices, and dredgers were developments and improvements upon Francesco di Giorgio's
Trattato di architettura civile e militare.
Leonardo's rules for perspective for painting and sculpture were derived
from Alberti's
De pictura
and
De statua
. His parachute was based on di Giorgio's. His helicopter was modeled on a Chinese toy imported to Italy circa 1440 and drawn by Taccola.
³¹
His work on canals, locks, aqueducts, and fountains originated from his meeting in Pavia with di Giorgio in 1490 (discussed in more detail in chapter 18). His cartography evolved from Alberti's
Descriptio urbis Romae.
His military machines were copies of Taccola's and di Giorgio's—but brilliantly drawn.

Leonardo's three-dimensional illustrations of the components of man and machines are a unique and brilliant contribution to civilization—as are his sublime sculptures and paintings. In my eyes, he remains the greatest genius who ever lived. However, it is time to recognize the Chinese contributions to his work. Without these contributions, the history of the Renaissance would have been very different, and Leonardo almost certainly would not have developed the full range of his talents.

B
y the time the
Nung Shu
was published in 1313, the Chinese had been spinning yarns for a thousand years, using all sorts of materials. Silk was the finest and most valuable; scrapings of hides were the heaviest and cheapest. Needham produces diagrams of an array of hand-powered and water-powered spinning machines with single and multiple looms.
¹

China had been exporting silk to Italy for a millennium by the time Taccola and Franceso di Giorgio appeared. In 115
B.C.
, Mithridates II of Persia made a commercial treaty with the Han emperor Wu Ti. In the next century, Julius Caesar possessed silk curtains.
²
By the reign of Augustus, wealthy people were buried in Chinese silk.
³

In return for fine silk, Chinese merchants sought gold, silver, coral, and glass. Chinese regarded high-quality glassware as a great luxury and were prepared to pay accordingly. During the Tang dynasty, monks smuggled silkworms from China to the West. Pictures of quilling machines, which wind silk thread onto bobbins, can be seen in the stained-glass windows of the Chartres cathedral, dating between 1240 and 1245. A clear illustration of the Chinese model is shown in
The Genius of China.
⁴

By the time Zheng He's fleet visited in 1434, Europeans had silkworms and knew how to wind silk thread and to make silk cloth, but in small quantities. The illustrations and descriptions in the
Nung Shu
showed how the whole Chinese process—production of silk thread, the dyeing and weaving of fine silk cloth, winding the silk threads onto bobbins—could be coupled with water power to expand production enormously.

Inventions such as Chinese water-powered threshers and mills facilitated the mass production of silk and rice.

Figures tell the story: In 1418, Venetian merchants paid tax on a mere three hundred pounds of silk. In 1441, the Florentine government passed a law requiring farmers to plant between 5 and 50 mulberry trees per hectare, depending on the yield from their farms.
⁵
Tens of thousands of mulberry trees were planted in northern Italy between 1465 and 1474. This period coincided with (or was one of the reasons for) a reversal of Venetian foreign policy. After the death of Doge Mocenigo in 1424, Venice under Francesco Foscari decided to become a land power in northern Italy. Verona, Vicenza, and the Po wetlands came into the Pax Venetica and the northern Po area was planted with
thousands upon thousands of mulberry trees as well as rice (described in chapter 18).

The daily chores of a Chinese housewife.

The first Italian hydraulic silk mill, in Verona, is described in 1456. It is a Chinese machine. John Hobson in
The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation
summarizes the spread of Italian silk-weaving machines to northern Europe: “The invention of the silk filatures (reeling machines) had been made in China in 1090. The Chinese machines comprised a treadle operated silk-reeling frame with a ramping board and a roller system. The Italian model resembled the Chinese right down to the smallest detail such as the lever joined to the crank. And significantly the Italian machines more or less replicated the Chinese right down to the eighteenth century.”
⁶
As Hobson points out, the great British mills set up by John Lombe were copies of “Chinese”-designed silk mills in Italy. Lombe's machines became the blueprint for
the British cotton industry, whose products later swamped the world.

The combination of abundant mulberry leaves and mechanical reeling and weaving machines led to soaring silk production in Florence and Venice. The Italian mulberry was much more prolific than the Chinese. Florence manufacturing switched from wool to silk. Sericulture spread from Tuscany first to the Po Valley and then to the “terra firma” north of Venice. Alberti wrote there were “so many mulberry trees to feed the worms from which the silk is obtained that it is a marvellous thing.” Estimated production of raw silk in the Verona district rose from 20,000 light pounds in 1530 to 150,000 in 1608. Vicenza produced 60,000 light pounds in 1504 and double that amount by 1608. As printing got under way in Venice, publications in clear and simple language explained how best to tend mulberry trees and feed and care for silkworms. Titles such as
Il vermicella dalla seta
(The little silkworm) were remarkably similar to fourteenth-century Chinese books on sericulture.

The development of sericulture led to more and better spinning machines. In the 1450s, Vicenza had eight shops of spinners. The number rose to ten in 1507, thirty-three in 1543, and over one hundred by 1596. Silk production in Verona underwent a similar expansion, rising from eight silk spinners in the 1420s to twelve in 1456, when Verona's first hydraulic mill, on the Adige, was commissioned (Mola, 237). After that, the industry exploded; there were fifty spinners' shops in 1543, seventy in 1549, and eighty-eight in 1559.

The raw silk and silk thread produced in the terra firma encouraged a new breed of entrepreneurs to buy silk. Many were financed by the Medicis. The Venetian government took a close interest in regulating the silk industry in its territory, issuing patents, which increased after the 1440s. In 1474, Venice published a general law of patents:

By these means, first Venice and Florence, then the whole of Italy came to dominate the raw-silk market of Europe—much as eastern Asia dominates the global market today.

Rice

Florence's silk-based economic boom required more workers, and more workers required more food. As Braudel has pointed out, the yield from rice fields is some several times that of wheat.
⁸

Rice had been known in the Mediterranean world since the Roman era, but it was used only for medicinal purposes. The first known reference to rice being grown in northern Italy is a letter of September 27, 1475, from the ruler of Milan, Galeazzo Sforza, to the duke of Ferrara concerning twelve sacks of Asian (
Oryza Sativa
) rice grown in the Po Valley.

Rice is the basic food of southern China. The
Nung Shu
included much advice from Wang Chen about wet rice cultivation, including how to husband and control water supplies from the great rivers that carry melted snow from the Mongolian plateau eastward to the sea.

Chinese irrigation design.

The
Nung Shu
illustrates all manner of techniques for the vital task of regulating water supply to the rice fields—many types of bucket and chain pumps, locks and sluices, dams and conduit channels. Buckets, pallets, and chain pumps are a theme,
⁹
as are bamboo “water palisades,” which acted as weirs.

As described in the previous chapter, Taccola and Francesco di Giorgio drew an array of pumps as well as dams and sluice gates.
¹⁰
The chain pumps first shown in the drawings of Taccola are still in use today in northeastern Italy, where the local people call them “Tartar” pumps. Since Taccola and Francesco's drawings of chain and bucket pumps were shown in chapter 16, in this chapter only piston pumps will be described.

Sheldon Shapiro in his article “The Origin of the Suction Pump” notes:

A Chinese chain pump used for irrigation purposes.

Clearly Franceso did not know how it worked; he must have copied a drawing.

As Needham points out, suction pumps in China are first described in the
Wu Ching Tsung Yao
(Collection of the most important military techniques, published in 1044). Here Needham describes the process: