First edition. A good look at industry in the Middle Ages. Includes information on early mills, mining, the mechanical clock, mathematics and experimental science. Much information on paper and its manufacture in early paper mills. Illustrated. xi, 274 pages. 1976 , 8vo., cloth, dust jacket.. Rinehart and Winston.

The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages

Gimpel, Jean

History

HOLT. RINEHART AND WINSTON

Recounts the construction of the great European cathedrals during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, discusses the rise of craftsmen's guilds, and explains why the religious building boom ended

The Cathedral Builders

Arts & Photography

Architecture

Perennial

A close examination of the industrial life and institutions of the Middle Ages and of that inventiveness that laid the foundations for our present technologically oriented society

Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages

Business & Money

Economics

Penguin??Books

This book represents the first calm, detailed, and rational description of the imminent end of western industrial civilization as we know it. Despite this alarming premise Gimpel is far from pessimistic, save in the short term: with the sure hand of the historian, he emphasizes how humanity has always recovered from its previous collapses in the past, and will certainly do so again. The unique value of this book is that it gives us a baseline from which we can now work into the future.
This book represents the first calm, detailed, and rational description of the coming end of our current world culture. The author seeks to show that, particularly when we compare actual technological reality in the 1990s with the heady predictions of futurologists back in the 1960s, technology has levelled off, reached a plateau―even in the leading-edge areas like infomatics, space, and medicine.
Even that plateau will prove to be temporary, claims Gimpel, and the end of western industrial society as we know it will inevitably ensue. However exceptional, our civilization has no reason to expect that it will evolve any differently from every civilization before it: decadence and decay have engulfed them all, one after the other. The unique value of this book is that it gives us a baseline from which we can now work into the future. The conclusion, which is not pessimistic―save in the short term―points out that humanity has always recovered from such collapses, and gone on again to reach new heights. By way of making his case, Gimpel leaves us with a final simple thought: The future, he asserts, is China.

The End of the Future: The Waning of the High-Tech World (Praeger Studies on the 21st Century)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Praeger

Recounts the construction of the great European cathedrals during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, discusses the rise of craftsmen's guilds, and explains why the religious building boom ended

The Cathedral Builders (English and French Edition)

History & Criticism

Grove Pr

The Middle Ages, writes French scholar Jean Gimpel, saw an extraordinary flourishing of technological development throughout Europe. With the era came waterwheels and clock towers, nearly uniform machine parts and improvements in public hygiene, vaulting cathedrals and towering city walls, and a notion of spiritual and earthly progress that promised better things to come. In analyzing the growth of precision in measurement and of the experimental sciences, and in considering the careers of medieval geniuses such as the architect-inventor Villard de Honnecourt, Gimpel clearly conveys the intellectual excitement of the time. Sadly, it was undone by religious intolerance, brutal warfare, and the arrival of the plague as quickly as it rose.

The medieval machine: The industrial revolution of the Middle Ages

Victor Gollancz

Science & Math

Technology

Wildwood House

Medieval Machine: Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages

Futura Publications Limited

The common, simplistic view of the Middle Ages as religion-centered and materially backward is challenged by Jean Gimpel in this milestone study, originally published in 1976. The Medieval Machine tells how, between the years 900 and 1300, Europeans created their first industrial revolution, which set Western civilization on the road to global dominance. Gimpel describes the main features of this early machine the pervasive use of waterpower (the oil of the medieval era); the agricultural innovations that energized the population through better nourishment; the spread of mining along with mechanized iron mills; and the appearance of modern industrial problems such as labor unrest and pollution. This is a story of technology architect-engineers were adulated; there were tallest-building contests like those of the twentieth century. The climax comes with the invention of the key modern device-the mechanical clock. The subsequent technological decline, Gimpel explains, was due to plague, famine, and a reversion to mysticism.In the epilogue, Gimpel asserts that the West in his time faced another technological decline; he did not foresee the digital boom of the 1980s and 90s and the development of a post-industrial economies. Nevertheless, his predictions may provide valuable material for historians of the recent past.

The Medieval Machine

Engineering & Transportation

Engineering

RANDOM HOUSE UK

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