Gunnery and the Struggle for the New Science (1537-1687)
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Gunnery and the Struggle for the New Science (1537-1687) Catherine Ann France Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science September 2014 ii The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. iii Acknowledgements I acknowledge with gratitude the patient and critical advice and support of Sophie Weeks and Chris Kenny. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of the School of Philosophy of the University of Leeds for their award of a Doctoral Studentship. iv Abstract This thesis re-examines the contribution of ballistics and gunnery to the emergence of modern science. It seeks to answer the question that inevitably emerges from A. R. Hall’s seminal Ballistics in the Seventeenth Century (1952): Why did early modern scientists and writers on gunnery include theoretical treatments of the trajectory of a gun in their works, despite the fact that it could be of no use to the practice of gunnery? Hall’s response to this perplexing question was simply that ballistic theory provided a scientific ‘veneer’ in support of attempts to gain patronage from rulers and military leaders who were anxious to gain an advantage in the new cannon warfare that played a crucial role in the development of the emerging European nation states from the end of the fifteenth century. Recent historiography, which has emphasised the role of etiquette and rhetoric in patronage relationships, has only served to bolster the credibility of Hall’s explanation, leading to an attenuation of the programme of the early modern writers who attempted to solve the mystery of the trajectory (‘the gunners’ question’). My thesis contends that, pace Hall, the struggle for the solution to the gunners’ question is paradigmatic for the resolution of unsolved issues in the history of science, and would aid substantially in delineating the role of mathematics and quantification not only in ballistics but in the transformation of natural enquiry into a recognisably modern enterprise. Whilst retaining the long-term chronological approach of Hall, my thesis re- examines in detail a number of central figures in the history of ballistics as historical actors, rather than focusing narrowly on theoretical results. This brings to the v forefront their struggle to unite theory with practice and to persuade their audience of the necessity for a new approach to natural enquiry. Through a re-examination of key texts, the thesis attempts to uncover their wider programmatic aims. They all had in common a self-perception that they were involved in building a new science of motion that would lay certain foundations for practice, they sought commonalities in all the diverse domains of the natural and artificial world, and they recognised that this was the only route to new and certain knowledge. vi Contents Acknowledgements iii Abstract iv Contents vi List of illustrations x Note on texts and translations xi Thesis introduction 1 Chapter one Niccolò Tartaglia: evangelist for a new science Introduction 22 What was Tartaglia’s new science? 30 The impact of Tartaglia’s new science 33 The cognitive importance of the range to angle relationship 39 Unifying disparate domains: the structure of the Nova Scientia and Tartaglia’s central dilemma 43 The trajectory, proportion and effects 45 Tartaglia’s elusive range tables 47 Did Tartaglia change his mind about the trajectory? 53 From the Nova Scientia to the Quesiti: Physical causes and the science of weights 59 Conclusion 66 vii Chapter two Thomas Digges: a new science in defence of religion and commonwealth Introduction 68 Digges’s ballistics 82 Falling objects, ships and Copernicanism 92 Digges’s relationship to other gunnery writers 96 Plots: real or imagined? 98 Digges’s programme for military reform: The discourses on military discipline 106 The European context: Justus lipsius and military reform 108 The treatise on invasion: Digges as Archimedes’ heir 111 Conclusion 114 Chapter three Harriot and Galileo: common roots and different routes to the new science Introduction 118 Genesis of the ballistic theories of Thomas Harriot and Galileo 126 The significance of the void in Galileo’s conceptual framework 136 Conclusion 145 Chapter four ‘Nature does not make these blunders’: Evangelista Torricelli’s defence of the new science viii Introduction 147 The critical response to Galileo’s theory of motion 147 Torricelli’s De motu gravium 154 Criticism from France and Torricelli’s mathematical realism 156 Copernicanism, the law of fall, and the Jesuit challenge 164 The Renieri-Torricelli correspondence 172 Conclusion 180 Chapter five ‘Causes not experiments’: the internal life and external face of the Accademia del Cimento Introduction 183 The Academy and its experiments 186 The Saggi experiments on guns 196 A context for the gun experiments: Riccioli’s Almagestum novum (1651) 203 Dodging and weaving 209 Conclusion 216 Chapter six François Blondel, absolutism and the art of launching bombs Introduction 217 The military context 223 Vauban and siege warfare 225 ix Petit Renau and the bomb ships 227 Colbert and the bellicose dynastic versus the bellicose mercantilist programme 231 Religion and the new science 233 L’Art de Jetter les Bombes 235 Conclusion 255 Chapter seven Gunnery and the Royal Society: the establishment of the new science Introduction 259 The Royal Society 261 Edmond Halley and the solution of a problem of great use in gunnery 271 A discourse concerning gravity 274 A proposition of general use in the art of gunnery 278 Matters of state 282 Conclusion 284 Thesis conclusion 286 x List of Illustrations Figure 1 Frontispiece of the Nova Scientia 31 Figure 2 Tartaglia’s diagram for proposition nine of the second book of the Nova Scientia 50 Figure 3 Tartaglia explains how positional weight affects the trajectory 62 Figure 4 Digges’s depiction of an infinite universe from A Prognostication Everlastinge 70 Figure 5 A reconstruction of elements of Digges’s trajectory 87 Figure 6 Arte et Marte (By Scholarship and War) 110 Coloured pen-drawing by J Wijts (1607) Figure 7 Photograph of the Fortezza Vecchia in Livorno 198 Figure 8 Photograph from I.B. Cohen’s The Birth of the New Physics (1992) 202 Figure 9 Frontispiece, Riccioli’s Almagestum Novum 204 Figure 10 Comparison of frontispieces of 1683 and 1686 editions of L’art de jetter les Bombes 235 Figure 11. Blondel’s illustration, adapted from that of Galileo in the Two New Sciences, of the effect of an object dropped onto a rotating earth. 243 xi Note on Texts and Translations I have retained the original spelling in quotations from primary texts. Where translations have been available I have compared them to the original, and provided references to the original. Where I have had to provide my own translation, I have indicated this in the footnotes and provided the original text. 1 Gunnery and the Struggle for The New Science: 1537-1687 Tous ces obstacles qui s’oppose à l’intégration de la pensée théorique et de l’action expérimentale se reflètent dans le dialogue sur la trajectoire parcourue par un boulet de canon.1 Introduction Anyone who writes on gunnery in the Early Modern period does so in the shadow of A. R. Hall’s Ballistics in the Seventeenth Century (1952). It will remain the seminal work of reference on gunnery and science, and my aim is not to replace it but to offer an alternative narrative and historiographical approach. Unlike Hall, who focused on the question of whether science was any use to gunnery in the early modern period, I have sought to use the relationship between developments in gunnery and the theory of motion as a prism, through which it may be possible to gain a deeper insight into how science developed over the period from the appearance of Tartaglia’s Nova Scientia (1537) to the publication of Newton’s Principia (1687). The origin of the modern science of ballistics can be historically pinpointed in the technological developments in metallurgy and cannon warfare of the fifteenth century. These developments led to a recognition that there was a measurable relationship between the range of a gun and its angle of elevation. The search for this relationship and its quantification, the ‘gunner’s question’, was the stimulus for the quest for the discovery of the trajectory of a cannonball. This problem sits at the core of the science of motion and played a crucial epistemological role in the transition from pre-classical to classical mechanics. Furthermore, whether its interests were 1 Serge Moscovici, L’Expérience du mouvement: Jean-Baptiste Baliani disciple et critique de Galilée (Paris: Hermann, 1967), 190: ‘All these obstacles to the integration of theoretical thought and experimental action are reflected in the dialogue on the trajectory travelled by the bullet of a canon.’ My translation. 2 attack or defence, the enormous benefit to any nation that was able to find the secret of aiming a cannon with perfect accuracy ensured that this became one of the major unresolved technical issues of the day.2 I have taken the position that it is precisely the long-term theoretical and practical challenge that the development of cannon warfare posed that makes it a fruitful subject for close historical scrutiny. During the early modern period, the cannon and its trajectory played a key epistemological role as a ‘challenging object’. As Jürgen Renn and Peter Damerow explain, before the onset of the experimental method, challenging objects: … were a key source of empirical knowledge which accounts for one aspect of their fundamental role in the conceptual reorganization of mechanical knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.