Renaissance technology

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Renaissance technology is the set of European artifacts and customs which span the Renaissance period, roughly the 14th through the 16th century. The era is marked by profound technical advancements such as the printing press, linear perspective in drawing, patent law, double shell domes and Bastion fortresses. Sketchbooks from artisans of the period (Taccola and Leonardo da Vinci for example) give a deep insight into the mechanical technology then known and applied.
Renaissance science spawned the Scientific Revolution; science and technology began a cycle of mutual advancement.

Basic technology

Some important Renaissance technologies, including both innovations and improvements on existing techniques:

• mining and metallurgy
• blast furnace enabled iron to be produced in significant quantities
• finery forge enabled pig iron (from the blast furnace) into bar iron (wrought iron)
• slitting mill mechanized the production of iron rods for nailmaking
• smeltmill increased the output of lead over previous methods (bole hill)

15th century

Parachute

Veranzio's 1595 parachute design titled "Flying Man"

The earliest known parachute design appears in an anonymous manuscript from 1470s Renaissance Italy; it depicts a free-hanging man clutching a crossbar frame attached to a conical canopy. As a safety measure, four straps run from the ends of the rods to a waist belt. Around 1485, a more advanced parachute was sketched by the polymath Leonardo da Vinci in his Codex Atlanticus (fol. 381v), which he scaled in a more favorable proportion to the weight of the jumper. Leonardo's canopy was held open by a square wooden frame, altering the shape of the parachute from conical to pyramidal. Venetian inventor Fausto Veranzio (1551–1617) modified da Vinci's parachute sketch by keeping the square frame, but replacing the canopy with a bulging sail-like piece of cloth. This he realized decelerates the fall more effectively. In 1617 Veranzio successfully tested his parachute design by jumping from a tower in Venice.
Printing press

Two printers operating a Gutenberg-style printing press (1568). Such presses could make around 3.600 impressions per workday.

The invention of the printing press by the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg (1398–1468) is widely regarded as the single most important event of the second millenium, and was one of the defining moments of the Renaissance. The Printing Revolution which it sparked throughout Europe worked as a modern "agent of change" (Eisenstein) in the transformation of medieval society. The mechanical device consisted of a screw press modified for printing purposes which could produce 3.600 pages per workday, allowing the mass production of printed books on a proto-industrial scale. By the start of the sixteenth century, printing presses were operating in over 200 cities in a dozen European countries, producing more than twenty million volumes.By 1600 their output had risen tenfold to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies, while Gutenberg book printing spread from Europe further afield.
The relatively free flow of information transcended borders and induced a sharp rise in Renaissance literacy, learning and education; the circulation of (revolutionary) ideas among the rising middle classes, but also the peasants, threatened the traditional power monopoly of the ruling nobility and was a key factor in the rapid spread of the Protestant Reformation. The dawn of the Gutenberg Galaxy, the era of mass communication, was instrumental in fostering the gradual democratization of knowledge which saw for the first time modern media phenomena such as the press or bestsellers emerging. The prized incunables, which are testimony to the aesthetic taste and high technical competence of Renaissance book printers, are one lasting legacy of the fifteenth century.

Early 17th century

Newspaper

Title page of the Relation (1609), the earliest newspaper

The newspaper was an offspring of the printing press from which the press derives its name. The 16th century saw a rising demand for up-to-date information which could not be covered effectively by the circulating hand-written newssheets. For "gaining time" from the slow copying process, Johann Carolus of Strassburg was the first to publish his German-language Relation by using a printing press (1605). In rapid succession, further German newspapers were established in Wolfenbüttel (Avisa Relation oder Zeitung), Basel, Frankfurt and Berlin. From 1618 onwards, enterprising Dutch printers took up the practice and began to provide the English and French market with translated news. By the mid-17th century it is estimated that political newspapers which enjoyed the widest popularity reached up to 250,000 readers in the Holy Roman Empire, around one fourth of the literate population^.

Tools, devices, work processes

15th century

Brace
The earliest carpenter's braces equipped with a U-shaped grip, that is with a compound crank, appeared between 1420 and 1430 in Flandres.

Technical drawings of artist-engineers

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The revived scientific spirit of the age can perhaps be best exemplified by the voluminous corpus of technical drawings which the artist-engineers left behind, reflecting the wide variety of interests the Renaissance Homo universalis pursued. The establishment of the laws of linear perspective by Brunelleschi gave his successors, such as Taccola, Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Leonardo da Vinci, a powerful instrument to depict mechanical devices for the first time in a realistic manner. The extant sketch books give modern historians of science invaluable insights into the standards of technology of the time. Renaissance engineers showed a strong proclivity to experimental study, drawing a variety of technical devices, many of which appeared for the first time in history on paper.
However, these designs were not always intended to be put into practice, and often practical limitations impeded the application of the revolutionary designs. For example, da Vinci's ideas on the conical parachute or the winged flying machine were only applied much later. While earlier scholars showed a tendency to attribute inventions based on their first pictorial appearance to individual Renaissance engineers, modern scholarship is more prone to view the devices as products of a technical evolution which often went back to the Middle Ages.

Technology	Date	Author	Treatise	Comment
Pile driver	1475 [14]	Francesco di Giorgio Martini	Trattato di Architectura	Drawing of such a device whose principle must be according to the Brazilian historian of technology Ladislao Reti "considered original with Franceso".
Centrifugal pump	1475 [14]	Francesco di Giorgio Martini	Trattato di Architectura	Water or mud-lifting machine "that must be characterized as the prototype of the centrifugal pump".