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Pneumatics, Automata and the Vacuum in the Work of Giambattista Aleotti

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

A. G. Keller
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Extract

In most of the more lively fields of physical enquiry in the first three decades of the seventeenth century, a striking contrast may be observed between the antiquity of the problems attacked, and the innovatory procedures applied to solve them. None of these questions, inherited from a past now remote, seemed more pressing than the time-honoured controversy of the plenum versus the vacuum, especially as the concept of the atomic structure of matter was so closely associated with the existence of the void. The more one studies the arguments produced at that time, the more one will be impressed with the value and importance, for the vacuists and the atomists, of the Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria. When we read Galileo's explanation of combustion, “the extremely fine particles of fire, penetrating the narrow pores of the metal (too small to admit even the minutest particles of air or of many other fluids) would fill the minute intervening vacuum, and would set free these minute particles from the forced attraction which these same vacua exert’, we can hear clear echoes of Hero's account of disseminated micro-vacua. Now Hero's work is clearly divided into two sections: a theoretical preface and a collection of 78 “pneumatic devices”. One might be tempted to claim that he, rather than his fellow-atomist Lucretius, inspired the first tentative syntheses of seventeenth-century atomism but it would still be necessary to agree that his chief contributions to the achievements of that generation lie in the experimental techniques which they derived from his instrumentation. Were it not for the popularity of his pneumatic demonstrations, he could never have won such a great reputation as a natural philosopher. Without that reputation, his opinions on this topic would not have been valued as almost equal to those of the mighty Aristotle, especially since he was so decidedly in the minority.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , December 1967 , pp. 338 - 347
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1967

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References

1 The usual English form “Hero” is used throughout, although some scholars prefer to call him “Heron”. This is not the place to discuss how much of the Pneumatica really was Hero's own work. However, ProfessorDrachmann, A. G.'s thorough examination of the question in his Ktesibios Philon and Heron (Copenhagen, 1948)Google Scholar has largely rehabilitated Hero's older reputation. The word “pneumatics” seems to have almost gone out of use, but the Concise Oxford Dictionary still gives it, defined as “Science of mechanical properties of air or other elastic fluids or gases”, so I shall employ it as a current term.

2 Galileo, , “Discorsi e Dimostrazioni … etc.”, Opere (Edizione Nazionale, Florence, 1898), VIII, 66Google Scholar. Translation freely adapted from Crew, H. and de Savio, A.Dialogues concerning Two New Sciencies (New York, 1914), 19.Google Scholar

3 Hero's immediate influence on the physical theories of the seventeenth century has been the subject of research by Schmidt, W., “Heron von Alexandria im 17 Jahrhundert”, Abhandlung zur Geschichte der Mathematik, viii (1898), 197Google Scholar; de Waard, G., L'Expérience Barométrique (Thouars, 1936)Google Scholar, passim;, Boas, M., “Hero's Pneumatica. A Study of its transmission and influence”, Isis, xl (1949), 38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 In the Italian translation (which I have been obliged to consult, since there does not seem to be a copy of the original in England), I Tre Libri de' Spiritali (Naples, 1606), 33.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 19.

6 Ibid., 17.

7 Ibid., 5. cf. 47, 52.

8 Rabelais, F., Gargantua and Pantagruel, Bk. I, ch. 24 (trans. Cohen, J. M., London, 1955, 93)Google Scholar. Gargantua's tutor, the learned doctor Ponocrates, was perhaps a little confused here, transferring the subject matter of the Pneumatica to Hero's other well-known book, the Automata.

9 Ceredi, G., Tre Discorsi sopra il Modo d'Alzar le Acque dai Luoghi Bassi (Parma, 1567), 11.Google Scholar

10 In Aleotti's MS. (vide infra), Theorem XVIII bis. The principle is attributed to Cardano's De Subtilitate, Book I (in the Basle 1560 edn., 16), but is no doubt ultimately inspired by various essays of Hero on the same theme, e.g. Pneumatica, Book II, chs. 22–24, edn. cit. I, 264–274.

11 Branca, G., Le Machine (Rome, 1629)Google Scholar, third part, figs. 15 and 6.

12 Compare these figures of Branca with Porta, , op. cit., Bk. II, Ch. 1, 32 f.Google Scholar

13 Cf. Branca, , op. cit.Google Scholar, part 3, figs, 3, 13, 17 with Porta Bk. II, chs. 13 and 15, 55, 57.

14 Cf. Branca, ibid., fig. 22 with Porta, Bk. III, ch. 5, 70.

15 Galileo, , Opere, Ed. naz, . (Florence, 1903), XIV, 124Google Scholar. Cf. Porta, , 62–64.Google Scholar

16 De Waard, C., L'Expérience Barométrique (Thouars, 1936), 101 ffGoogle Scholar. De Waard points out this resemblance between Berti's apparatus and that of Porta (ibid., 104). Berti's instrument is shown in De Waard's frontispiece, and at 184, 186.

17 Apart from this article, by A. I. Quintavalle and E. Povoledo, the most useful monograph on Aleotti is that by Cittadella, L. N., Memorie intorno alla vita ed alle opere dell'Architetto Giambattista Aleotti, ArgentanoGoogle Scholar; it prefaces his edition of a manuscript by his subject, Dell'interrimento del Po di Ferrara (Ferrara, 1847).Google Scholar

18 Porta uses the same argument, op. cit., 17.Google Scholar

19 There is an illustration of this instrument, which continues in regular use, but slightly modified, in our own day, in a contemporary manuscript, the Matematica Maravigliosa, compiled by one Bartolomeo Telioux, at Rome in 1611, and now in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Paris: MS. 8525, f.44.

20 Porta, , op. cit., 86.Google Scholar

21 Kept in the Department of Printed Books, at the British Museum: cat. no. 8529. d. 17.

22 Spiritali de Herone Alessandrino (Urbino, 1592)Google Scholar. Giorgi's scholarship was philological in tone, and he refers the reader to the Greek MSS. at Rome and Bologna on which his version was based. Where Aleotti was prepared to modernize the appearance of his illustrations, Giorgi sought to reproduce his originals as accurately as possible. He disparaged the many linguistic errors made by Aleotti, who evidently took this criticism to heart, for the text of the British Museum 8529. d.17 is amended throughout, almost always following Giorgi's corrections.

23 Theorem XVIII in the MS.

24 Theorem XXIV of the musical section of the MS. Tiene is quite well known as an amateur and patron of mathematical studies. The playing of tunes was a novelty unknown to Hero, put at the disposal of the Renaissance engineer by the simple but ingenious invention of the pinned barrel. The musicians and the duck curiously foreshadow the choice of the great eighteenth-century designer of life-like automata, Jacques Vaucanson.

25 Ceredi, G., op. cit., 75.Google Scholar