The Various and Ingenious Machines of Agostino Ramelli - A Classic Sixteenth-Century Illustrated Treatise on Technology by Martha Teach Gnudi
One of the 16th century's most widely known and copied texts on mechanics, Ramelli's work was especially admired for the excellence of its technical illustrations, its descriptive appeal and its ingenious designs for a broad range of machinery, e.g. devices for raising and lowering water levels, milling grain, breaching military defenses and more. The book was a vital force in technological development for at least 200 years. The present volume . reproduces the rare folio edition published in 1588, including all 194 engraved illustrations, 20 of them double size. Among these are cutaway models and "exploded" diagrams so finely detailed that machines could actually be constructed from them. Depicted and described are precursors of today's giant cranes for moving and raising great weights, water pumps, military bridges, apparatus for scaling city walls and many other devices.
