1434 by Gavin Menzies

Author:Gavin Menzies
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-02-08T04:39:54+00:00

Chinese irrigation design.

The Nung Shu illustrates all manner of techniques for the vital task of regulating water supply to the rice fields—many types of bucket and chain pumps, locks and sluices, dams and conduit channels. Buckets, pallets, and chain pumps are a theme,9 as are bamboo “water palisades,” which acted as weirs.

As described in the previous chapter, Taccola and Francesco di Giorgio drew an array of pumps as well as dams and sluice gates.10 The chain pumps first shown in the drawings of Taccola are still in use today in northeastern Italy, where the local people call them “Tartar” pumps. Since Taccola and Francesco’s drawings of chain and bucket pumps were shown in chapter 16, in this chapter only piston pumps will be described.

Sheldon Shapiro in his article “The Origin of the Suction Pump” notes:

Not until the early fifteenth century does the first evidence of the valved piston appear. It turns up in a drawing (Fig. 4) by the Siennese engineer, Mariano Jacopo Taccola [in Munich Ms. 1435] whose still unpublished notebooks are of the greatest importance for the history of technology. In this drawing dating from about 1433, the valve in the piston is clear. Therefore, although a text and other details are lacking this drawing represents the first suction pump on record; it is unintelligible in any other terms.

The first detailed drawings of suction pumps date from the period 1475–1480; Francesco di Giorgio Martini in the last book of his Trattato di Architettura written about 1475 shows several suction pumps. In the most mechanically perfect pump the distance from the sump to the chamber seems only a foot or two, instead of the 32 feet possible, thus showing an imperfect understanding of the nature of this new type of pump.11

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