Renaissance technology
Renaissance technology is the set of European artifacts and customs which span the Renaissance period, roughly the 14th century through the 16th century. The era is marked by profound technical advancements such as the printing press, linear perspective in drawing, patent law, doubl and Bastion fortresses. Sketchbooks from artisans of the period (Taccola and Leonardo da Vinci, example) give a deep insight into the mechanical phones then known and applied.
Renaissance science spawned the Scientific Revolution; science and technology began a cycle of mutual advancement.
Some important Renaissance technologies, including both innovations and improvements on existing techniques:
The technologies that developed in Europe during the second half of the 15th century were commonly associated by authorities of the time with a key theme in Renaissance thought: the rivalry of the Moderns and the Ancients. Three inventions in particular — the printing press, firearms, and the nautical compass — were indeed seen as evidence that the Moderns could not only compete with the Ancients, but had surpassed them, for these three inventions allowed modern people to communicate, exercise power, and finally travel at distances unimaginable in earlier times.
The crank and connecting rod mechanism which converts circular into reciprocal motion is of utmost importance for the mechanization of work processes; it is first attested for Roman water-powered sawmills. During the Renaissance, its use is greatly diversified and mechanically refined; now connecting-rods are also applied to double compound cranks, while the flywheel is employed to get these cranks over the 'dead-spot'. Early evidence of such machines appears, among other things, in the works of the 15th-century engineers Anonymous of the Hussite Wars and Taccola. From then on, cranks and connecting rods become an integral part of machine design and are applied in ever more elaborate ways: Agostino Ramelli's The Diverse and Artifactitious Machines of 1588 depicts eighteen different applications, a number which rises in the 17th-century Theatrum Machinarum Novum by Georg Andreas Böckler to forty-five.
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