Today, let's talk about monks and waterwheels. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
By the year 1098 water
wheels had been around for a long time. But they'd
only begun to revolutionize Western European social
order. Here was a cheap and convenient power source
to replace the backbreaking labor of grinding
grain, fulling wool, and sawing wood. Labor had
been the beginning and end of most people's lives
through most of history. Now that was ready to
change.
That year, 1098, the Cistercian monastic order
formed. Fourteen years later, Saint Bernard took
charge of the order. He moved it in a direction
that would complete a major technological
revolution. The Cistercians were a strict branch of
the Benedictine order who fled worldly commerce to
live "remote from the habitation of man." Under St.
Bernard, they achieved that life by setting up
economic independence based on high technology.
By the middle of the12th century the order rode the
cutting edge of hydropower and agriculture. A
typical Cistercian monastery straddled an
artificial stream brought in through a canal. The
stream ran through monastery shops, living quarters
and refectories, providing power for milling, wood
cutting, forging, olive crushing. It also provided
running water for cooking, washing and bathing, and
finally for sewage disposal.
Cistercian monasteries were, in reality, the
best-organized factories the world had ever seen --
versatile and diversified. They represented a
rather strange way of living "remote from the
habitation of man," no doubt. But that's another
matter.
Modern historians have been correcting the deeply
ingrained idea that this was a Dark Age. The people
who've passed down written records were generally
remote from the world of making things. The scribes
of kings always wrote about the narrow world of
armies and slaughter. They had little to say about
the engineers who really changed the world. Only
recently have historians used archaeological
records to determine what people were actually
doing. Once they did that, they had to rewrite
medieval history.
The Cistercian engineers developed their new
technologies and spread them throughout Europe.
They tinkered and innovated. Another
life-transforming technology they shaped comes as a
surprise.
As water power freed people's hands, literacy began
rising. But books were still scarce. So the
Cistercians organized the technology of making
hand-written books. They developed the monastic
scriptorium. They
invented alphabetical indexing and pagination. They
came as far as possible in mass-producing usable
books -- before Gutenberg took book-making to
another plane entirely.
By the time 742 medieval Cistercian monasteries had
done their work, European life had emerged from
whatever Dark Age had been. It'd finally emerged
from a forest wilderness.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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