Science and Technology in Fifteenth Century

Science and Technology in Fifteenth Century

1450s Movable Type Printing

IT WAS the inventive genius of a German goldsmith called Johann Gutenberg (c. 1400-68) that ushered in the age of printing. During the late 1450s he devised the system for using individual type characters, cast in molds from an alloy of lead, tin and antimony, which were interchangeable within a frame. The phonetic nature of writing in Europe, with it's relatively few characters, gave it a distinct advantage over other writing such as Chinese, which comprised thousands of different characters and had been the language originally used to develop printing. It was quick and easy to assemble whole pages of type that could all be used time and time again for other jobs. As a result, printing took off rapidly. Within 30 years most of the western European countries had several printing works and by the early sixteenth century, most classical manuscripts were made available in print. The first newspaper appeared on sale in 1609 in Germany, where it had all started.





1473 The Birth of Copernicus

THE reinstatement of scientific inquiry led to an acceleration of progress, as it became the driving force in world culture. As a result, theories began to surface that contradicted popular opinion, but were postulated simply because scientific evidence suggested them to be tenable. Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543), a Polish astronomer, was the first to suggest that the Earth was not the center of the universe in post-medieval times. This came as a shock to European culture. His observations showed the earth to be rotating around the sun, which he in turn, mistakenly took to be the center of the universe, but nonetheless, the solar-system hypothesis had been born. Christian belief were dominant at this time, so any idea which refuted the notion that the universe was centered around humanity was not well received. Copernicus's major treatise -The Revolution of the Celestial Spheres- was not published until the year of his death. 





1493 The Birth of Paracelsus

A SWISS physician named Paracelsus (1493-1541) was the first scientist to make a nonsense of Galen's ideas about humors controlling the body and mind. He refuted the theory on the basis that the result of observation and experimentation should override the preconceptions of traditional lore, and that the results of his own studies had suggested scientifically based processes at work. He consequently established the practice of seeking external agents as explanations for disease and infection, making important progress in this area. By 1543 Vesalius, another great physician, had published his On the Workings of the Human Body, which opened the way for microscopic studies in the following centuries.