The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mine Pumping in Agricola's Time and Later, by
Robert P. Multhauf

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Title: Mine Pumping in Agricola's Time and Later

Author: Robert P. Multhauf

Release Date: January 20, 2010 [EBook #31024]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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CONTRIBUTIONS FROM
THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY:
PAPER 7

MINE PUMPING IN
AGRICOLA'S TIME AND LATER

_Robert P. Multhauf_

_By Robert P. Multhauf_

MINE PUMPING IN AGRICOLA'S TIME AND LATER

_Coins are a source of information much used by historians. Elaborately
detailed mining landscapes on 16th-century German coins in the National
Museum, discovered by the curator of numismatics and brought to the
author's attention, led to this study of early mine-pumping devices._

THE AUTHOR: _Robert P. Multhauf is curator of Science and Technology,
Museum of History and Technology, in the Smithsonian Institution's
United States National Museum._

The habit of heavy reliance on a single source for the substance of the
history of Medieval and Renaissance mining techniques in Europe has led
to a rather drastic over-simplification of that history, a condition
which persists tenaciously in the recent accounts of Parsons, Wolf, and
Bromehead.[1] Our preoccupation with Agricola, who has been well known
to the English-language public since the Hoovers' translation of 1912,
seems to have inhibited the investigation of the development of the
machines he describes so elegantly. More seriously, the opinion that
mining techniques remained essentially the same for a century or two
beyond his time appears to have hardened into a conviction.[2]

The history of the technology of mining, as distinguished from
metallurgy, is largely a history of mechanization, and that
mechanization has until the last century consisted principally in the
development of what Agricola calls _tractoriae_--hauling machines. That
hauling machines of some complexity, Archi