How Mechanics Shaped the Modern World

Mechanics progressed little during the Middle Ages, but there were nonetheless a few notable developments. For example, the Agia Sophia, San Vitale, and Basilica di San Marco were constructed during this period. Furthermore, advances in the calendar were driven by religion, as Easter became an important date for Christians. By the twelfth century, Christianity led to the development of numerous Gothic cathedrals, thus deploying practical mechanics devices across Western Europe. Simultaneously, organized education began to experience a rebirth, with universities arising at Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Salamanca and Padova. Mathematics developed in the Middle East by Al-Kwarizmi and others made their way to the West, principally due to the writings of Leonardo do Pisa. Ever so slowly, science began to develop once again, due in part to Bede, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, and William of Ockham. Written language also appeared once again in Western Europe, beginning with The Divine Comedy by Dante Aleghieri. But not all developments using mechanics were positive, as torture devices seemed to reach new levels of depravity.

The fifteenth century produced the first great scientific development in mechanics after the Middle Ages with the publication of Nicolas Copernicus’ Der Revolutionibus Orbium. Thereafter, astronomy took center stage, as scientists such as Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei made monumental gains in the science of mechanics. In addition, René Descartes invented analytic geometry, and Isaac Newton produced the first universal laws. In mechanics, Blaise Pascal produced the first computer, called the Pascaline. Mathematics flowered, and with it the tools necessary to model mechanics precisely. By the early eighteenth century mechanists such as the Bernoullis and Leonhard Euler were attempting to model deformable bodies.

The publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia in the late seventeenth century paved the way for dramatic developments in the eighteenth century. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, scientists were prepared to take on the challenge of the mechanics of three-dimensional deformable bodies. Theories governing the mechanics of fluids, solids, and the diffusion of heat were formulated using the newly developed platform called continuum mechanics. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the concepts of classical mechanics had reached a degree of maturity. It was left for the Impressionist artists of the latter third of the century to push art in a direction that could be said to have been the prelude to moving beyond the bounds of continuum mechanics. At the same time, engineers began using the new-found theoretical models to develop a field of mechanics termed structural mechanics.