Essays In The History Of Mechanics

This volume collects my shorter articles on the history of mechanics, some already published in various places, some revised from earlier papers, and some never published before. All of them began as lectures, and here they are printed as such, little changed from the last times I read them out to an audience. While the several articles concern different aspects of mechanics, overlap and even some repetition could not be avoided, since mechanics is one great science, and the same original oftentimes served more than one end in its growth. My three major historical treatises, which were published in Volumes (II) 11 , 2 12, and 13 of L. Euleri Opera Omnia, are not included. To simplify the printing I have also mostly omitted detailed reference to sources discussed more fully in those treatises, but of course I have added to the texts of the lectures citations of other sources, some notes in answer to questions a reader might ask, and biblio graphical notes at the end of each. I am grateful to the U.S. National Science Foundation for its support of this work through a grant to The Johns Hopkins University.

This book treats several subjects from the History of Mechanism and Machine Science, and also contains an illustrative presentation of the Museum of Engines and Mechanisms of the University of Palermo, Italy, which houses a collection of various pieces of machinery from the last 150 years. The various sections deal with some eminent scientists of the past, with the history of industrial installations, machinery and transport, with the human inventiveness for mechanical and scientific devices, and with robots and human-driven automata. All chapters have been written by experts in their fields. The volume shows a wide-ranging panorama on the historical progress of scientific and technical knowledge in the past centuries. It will stimulate new research and ideas for those involved in the history of Science and Technology.

This book assembles 21 essays on the history of mechanics and mathematical physics written by David Speiser. Covering a period from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the eighteenth, the essays discuss developments in elasticity, rigid bodies, gravitation, the principle of relativity, optics, and first principles. They examine the work of Galileo, Huygens, Newton, Leibniz, the Bernoullis, Euler, Maupertuis, and Lambert.

The history of mechanics, and more particularly, the history of mechanics applied to constructions, constitutes a field of research that is relatively recent. This volume, together with the recent publication "Towards a History of Construction", is intended as an homage to the two eminent scholars who made a determinant contribution to the history of mechanics: Edoardo Benvenuto and Clifford Truesdell.

"A remarkable work which will remain a document of the first rank for the historian of mechanics." — Louis de Broglie In this masterful synthesis and summation of the science of mechanics, Rene Dugas, a leading scholar and educator at the famed Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, deals with the evolution of the principles of general mechanics chronologically from their earliest roots in antiquity through the Middle Ages to the revolutionary developments in relativistic mechanics, wave and quantum mechanics of the early 20th century. The present volume is divided into five parts: The first treats of the pioneers in the study of mechanics, from its beginnings up to and including the sixteenth century; the second section discusses the formation of classical mechanics, including the tremendously creative and influential work of Galileo, Huygens and Newton. The third part is devoted to the eighteenth century, in which the organization of mechanics finds its climax in the achievements of Euler, d'Alembert and Lagrange. The fourth part is devoted to classical mechanics after Lagrange. In Part Five, the author undertakes the relativistic revolutions in quantum and wave mechanics. Writing with great clarity and sweep of vision, M. Dugas follows closely the ideas of the great innovators and the texts of their writings. The result is an exceptionally accurate and objective account, especially thorough in its accounts of mechanics in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the important contributions of Jordanus of Nemore, Jean Buridan, Albert of Saxony, Nicole Oresme, Leonardo da Vinci, and many other key figures. Erudite, comprehensive, replete with penetrating insights, AHistory of Mechanics is an unusually skillful and wide-ranging study that belongs in the library of anyone interested in the history of science.

The Page-Barbour Lectures of 1985, University of Virginia.