Jochen Büttner

The Challenging Images of Artillery

Princely families of old were in the habit of engaging historians who were charged with producing tailor-made histories, in which the achievements of these families received due attention. For a long time this, remarkably, was exactly what natural scientists also expected from their historians. As a matter of fact, from the point of view of developed science, the knowledge of a discipline is simply represented by the natural laws that define its object. It was accordingly a matter of course for its historians to concentrate solely on the question of who had discovered which of these laws when and in what manner. In this sense, the history of science is a biographically oriented, heroic history of the great discoverers and their discoveries (fig. 1).

Shooting with ink

The sixteenth century saw the emergence of preclassical external ballistics. It was engendered by a new representational means—the trace of the path of a shot outlined on paper. This resulted in the concept of a trajectory in which practitioners’s knowledge of the behavior of gunshots was fused with knowledge from other domains. In the practical literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, preclassical external ballistics increasingly became a self-contained subject. The different accounts given were abstracted and segregated from the practical knowledge on which they were based and often focused on aspects that had little or no relevance for the actual practice of shooting. Preclassical external ballistics had virtually no impact on the practice of gunnery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and only marginal improvements were made due to its application to gun shooting in the field. Preclassical external ballistics reestablished contact with the practice of shooting from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards when learned men with close ties to practice, who relied on the help of gunners and their infrastructure, transformed guns into experimental systems in order to probe the claims of external ballistics. This was mainly done because of the precarious status it had earned due to its divergence from practical knowledge and gunnery practice.

Galileo’s Unpublished Treatises

Galileo’s last publication, his Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze attenenti alla mecanica & i movimenti locali (1638), is widely considered to be one of the most influential contributions of early modern science to the emergence of classical physics. As the title of Galileo’s book indicates, he himself claimed to have established “two new sciences,” including a new science of motion which, from the perspective of classical physics, indeed turned the Aristotelean theory of motion, which had prevailed for hundreds of years, into an obscure medieval relic.