The Tech of 1510

we're kind of going. We're gonna start this off with a little listener mail. This listener mail comes from Annette, and a net says dear John and Chris, but especially John. Hello, my name is Annette, and I'm a listener of Josh and Chuck's podcast. She left that bit out. I suggested that they do a podcast about the Renaissance fair phenomenon and creative anachronism. They referred me to you because you're

going to star in a Renaissance Fair. I understand that this is not a typical tech stuff topic, but Josh seems certain that you can work it in somehow. What do you think by the way they say you guys smell their words not mine best, Annett. Of course, I think we've we've already fired back with the you smell uh volley that that went up a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. Frankly, I'm not sure how we evolved into you smell, No, you smell, but I don't want to get into that.

They started it, they started it well, Annette, thank you very much for the email, and yes it is true. Uh, I am in a local Renaissance festival. Um, just so you know, my character's name is Lord Admiral Edmund Vane Glory the third as not a joke. And we're gonna talk today about the tech of fifteen ten years ago. Does that mean we need to get in the machine. Let's not do that because it would be an entire episode in the past and I think Liz would kill us.

But we are talking about the the technology of fifteen tens, so let's set the stage a bit. Fifteen ten. King Henry the Eighth has been on the throne for a full year. Really he should never mind, No, not King Henry the Eighth has ruled England for a full year. Uh. Yeah, he he was coordinated in fifteen o nine, got married to uh to Cat his first wife, Cat. We're really close. Actually no we're not, because he was divorced by the time.

Well anyway, so fifteen o nine, fifteen ten, sorry, fifteen ten. We're what kind of technology was around at this time? And can we really call it technology? One of the uh, of course we could call it technology. I mean lots of things are technology, they just don't seem like it now that we live in an age where there are lots of circuits and things that beep. I thought that was an important point to make, and I'm glad you made it. Um Yeah, because I mean, thinking back to

our what's better paper or digital podcasts? I was thinking, well, you know, paper is a technology. Before they had that, we really didn't have some kind of portable, lightweight method by which information could be preserved like that. I mean, tables were not lightweight, nor were they particularly uh strong. They didn't last forever, you know pretty yeah, yes, stone is pretty sturdy. Well, not the easiest thing to write on. Just just in making my point, I'll make this short.

Thinking about things like data rot in where you have a DVD or a CD that lasts fifty years or something like that. A piece of paper with ink on that if you protect it can last longer than that. So these are I'm just saying, okay, so very good. The tricky part I found in researching this is all

the stuff that was invented in fifteen ten. I really it's kind of hard to find anything that was specifically invented in fifteen ten, but that lost lots of technology actually had been going on before that, because they in Europe we were going through the Renaissance right right now in England. Parts in England you would probably call this the High Middle Ages because really you get into the Elizabethan era, that's when you start talking about the Renaissance

in England. But yes, other parts of the world were far more advanced than England at this point. In fact, if you look at places like China or or the Middle East, they had made advances in technology that put medieval Europe to shame. Um So, but we'll get into some of that. Let's talk a little bit about some of the things that you might have seen had you been walking around medieval Europe in fifteen ten, the kind

of technologies you might encounter. All Right, So if you were a sailor and you were in England in fifteen ten, and you were one of the King's favorites, you might get a chance to serve aboard the fla bag ship of what was the brand new Royal Navy of England, the flagship being called the Mary Rose. Yes Mary m A r y not m E r r y uh named as far as we know, after Henry the eighth sister then, and the Mary Rose was a fairly new kind of vessel um in England at the time it was.

It was had a carvel hull. Carvel hall, by the way, does not mean it was Fudgi the whale or cookie pus. It's not that kind of carvel Yeah, now I'm all hungry a lot. Sorry. Um No, The carvel hall was a specific way of building a ship previous to carvel hall or the the the clinker ships. A clinker ship was a made by making overland overlapping planks and then you had a little frame that you could attach to that.

So the planks were the most important part. But the carvel hull was used a strong framework and then used planks that fit against each other, um in a more or less a seamless fashion. Um. They weren't really possible until you invented the saw. So it turns out the saw was very important as far as the development of naval warfare is concerned. High technology. Yeah, So you would put these planks next to each other, you would calk them.

So that's water tight. Also very important as it turns out, for boats, and it provided the opportunity to introduce watertight gun poarts also very important. So the gun ports. That allows you to put the guns closer to the the waterline, you know, and you could close the gun ports and you uh they were since they were watertight, you didn't have to worry about water coming into the ship and

having a capsize. And uh that was that was actually really important in that if you wanted to carry a lot of guns on your ship, you couldn't just them all on the deck. If you did, then that would make the deck, it would make the ship top heavy, so whenever you would turn, you would have the the

the danger of capsizing. This actually happened. There was a a ship that was built about fifty or sixty years before the time we're talking about, where it was the most magnificent ship you had ever seen, tons and tons of guns on it. They put a whole bunch of men on it launched it immediately at capsized sank everyone

died because it was too top heavy. Now, the mary Rose had a different design where you could have guns on the deck and guns on a gun deck beneath the the deck deck de yeah, okay deck and this this was that sounds like it's kind of you know, basic stuff, but this is the sort of technology that that Europeans began to depend upon in naval warfare, which

started to play a larger role from about fifteen onward. Um. And when I say that the mary Rose was the flagship of the British Navy, you should keep in mind that the British Navy at that time consisted of about thirty ships total. Yeah, and a lot of those were merchant ships that had been conscripted into the navy. You know, cannon at that time were not made of cast iron.

They were made of wrought iron and bronze um. But they did have exploding shot yes um, which would I imagine be pretty nasty if you happen to be on one of the other ships. Yeah, it's not something you want to get hit with. Uh. And and bronze cannon they were lighter than uh, than your iron cannon, but they were much more expensive than iron cannons. Uh. So you again, it would depend upon the wealth of the nation or ship owner as to what kind of cannon would be on that ship, as well as the the

seaworthiness of the ship itself. I mean, if a ship couldn't carry that many iron cannon, they might choose to spend the money need to get the bronze cannon instead. And of course those those cannon were more likely to be a matchlock. Yeah, let's let's talk about matchlocks for

a second. It's an interesting technology. So before the matchlock was invented, the way that guns worked in the Middle Ages, well, the earliest guns were essentially just a barrel with a hole in them on on well, you know, a little hole drilled at the top of the barrel on the the the end that the gun that the shot does not come out of handle basically yeah, where the stock is, yeah, or where the stock would be if we're talking, Yeah,

that's true, because we're not talking about about personal weapons. We're talking like a cannon cannon. There were some handheld weapons as well, but they were very difficult to use and required more than one person generally, Yeah, because you couldn't just yeah, exactly one hand. We haven't gotten to that part. We're gonna get to that part. So you've gotta you've gotta hold drilled that end and uh, this is where you would put a burning wick through the

whole hole to ignite the gunpowder that's inside the barrel. Yes, because the shot is uh you know, closer to the end, the other end of the barrel, um and you have the gunpowder behind that pelt. Yeah, So the gunpowder ignites and as it ignites, it gives off quite a bit of gas, and that gas is what expels the shot from the barrel. Uh. So that meant that you had to have at least one hand to hold a a lit match or a wick of some sort to insert

it in the hole. Which does mean that if you are just one single person and you have one of these rifles, you only have one hand to aim it with while you're using the other hand to light it. It's not the most accurate weapon. The matchlock kind of made this, uh, took that out of your hands and put it into a mechanical hand, so to speak. I mean, there was a there was something called a serpentine, which

is an S shaped trigger and basely uh. At one end of the S you have your match and at the other end is where your finger goes, and when you move it, it basically pivoted in the center, so that when you pull the trigger, it would bring the match down and that would you know, and the flash pan and it would set off the charge essentially. So the way the flash pan works is that, you know, we talked about that that earlier example, you had a hole that you had to put the match through. The

flash pan takes that part out of it. The flash pan holds a small amount of gunpowder that then leads from right, that leads in through a hole in the barrel to a larger charge of gunpowder. That's the part that actually propels the shot. And by lighting the flash pan, the you know, it's like those old movies where you know, you light the one end of the gunpowder and it goes down the line and the lights the big barrel at the end, singing sort of concept, except into much

smaller space. You're you light the flash flash pan, the gunpowder lights through the hole in the barrel. Lighting the main charge in the barrel of the gun fires off the shot. So, yeah, the matchlock meant that you just pulled the little trigger and it would bring the the lit fuse in contact with the flashpan. Eventually, you would get a flashpan cover over that that would also be hooked up to the trigger, so that when you pulled the trigger, the flashpan cover would slide out of the

way as the fuse comes down. And that was important to protect the powder because, of course, if the powder were to get wet, yes, that's a problem, your gun was useless exactly. Yeah, so even foggy conditions could mess up the effectiveness of a gun. And when we talk about guns, we're talking mainly we're talking about cannon. We're talking about the arquebus um, which was a a personal weapon you could it was essentially the the precursor to the musket and uh, which of course is precursor to

the rifle, and it ended up revolutionizing warfare. Yeah. Well, the arquebus all so had a some people called it a heck butt because it had a basically a little hook on it. And uh, what would happen is, you know, castles were sort of going through a technological change too, because now that uh, people were beginning to use firearms, personal firearms, not just cannon. Um. You know, they needed a way too. They had all these arrow slits in the walls of the castle which needed to be you know,

which people needed to use for their firearms. So the thing is is, as you mentioned before, Jonathan, they the powder and these weapons gave off a lot of gas and had you know, packed a bit of a wallop. We're talking about a you know, recoil, and so that's what the hook was for. Basically, you'd use the hook to hook over the uh the stone wall of the castle to keep it from you know, knocking you back

as you fired the weapon wall of the castle. Uh. Yeah, castles actually ended up becoming both castles and armor became less and less important as gunpowder became more important because they didn't provide much of a of a protection and so uh, countries had to readjust the way they conducted warfare. Um. And it wasn't like the old days where you just got a bunch of people all in various kinds of armor and then had them clashed together, or you hold up in a castle and tried to wait out a siege.

You couldn't really do that in an arrow where the basic weapons could punch holes through your walls like there were nothing. Yeah, yeah, that's true. You know. It kind of bummed out that we didn't get to talk in great detail about flint lock and the wheel lock mechanisms yet. No. No, although the wheelock apparently was developed around fifteen fifteen, so it's not much in the future. And depending on who

you asked, they might say that flintlocks were around. But really flintlocks, I mean, people didn't document stuff is accurately. It turns out it turns out the guy didn't wake up and July fourteen invented the flintlock. Today that doesn't turns out that didn't happen. But interesting bit of trivia. I found out the reason that these are called fill in the blank here lock was because locksmiths used to work with a lot of them mechanisms similar to what

you know the kinds of technology used here. So if you wanted these things built for your weaponry, you would consult with a locksmith who would work on the little, tiny little pieces that you would need to add to your firearms. That makes it interesting. Yeah, it makes sense, you know, because you think you know that there were no our definitions hadn't really taken effect there. We don't. We don't have the same things like engineers the way

we have engineers. Now, you had philosophers, you had scientists, a various uh rudimentary sciences at the time, although again if you go to the Middle East they were much further along and in China as well. Uh. Well, I was gonna talk also a couple of other things that are related to guns. Oh yeah, because because we're gotting crazy. Um well, it was. It was awfully prominent too. Yeah. A lot of the technology in the Middle Ages dealt

with warfare. Yeah, I mean it just that was you think about invention and uh you know the whole necessity driving invention. Well, in the Middle Ages, it was pretty much necessary for you to be able to attack and defend um, because that's pretty much what the entire history was about in large part. So one of the interesting things that made cannon very possible actually a couple of

different inventions. One of them was the trunyon. Trunion is a fancy word for the posts that stick out the side of a cannon that allow you to change the elevation of the cannon. Oh. I figured it was a combination of a truffle and an onion. No, but that does sound tasty. Now this, uh, this was just what allowed you to pivot a cannon upward or downward so that you can name it instead of it just pointing in a direction hoping that that's good enough, right, um.

And then you had limbers. Limbers are these two wheeled devices that you could hook up to a carriage. You would mount a gun on them, and it just made it easier for you to um to transport artillery. That was another big change by this time in the Middle Ages. Earlier in the Middle Ages, if you wanted to lay siege to a castle, you either had to have large artillery pieces that you could assemble once you got there, or you were using things like um trebisches or even

if you're using even older technology ballista and catapults. And just so you guys know, uh, those are technologies that use basic physics to propel a projectile a very far away with a lot of force. These days pumpkins, yes, so like a catapult would use uh rope, yes that had been wound very tightly a skein. Actually it's wound very very tightly, and that would be enough to you.

You know, you stick one end of the catapult through that that rope and then you wind it really tight, and that provides the tension that when you release it, it makes the arm go up until it hits arrest, and then that propels a projectile. Ballista used two of those. It looked like a giant crossbow, but in fact used two um uh skeins to propel a projectile. And then the trebuche was a little different. It was a sling

on the end of a long arm. Um it was actually a lever, So he had a long end of the lever which had the the sling attached to it, and then on the short end you had a counterweight, a very very heavy counterweight, and when you released the the mechanism on it, the counterweight would fall down, propelling the long arm up and flinging whatever the projectile was

in the direction of your target. And those were all the older forms of projectile weaponry that essentially got phased out once cannon became a real player in the Middle Ages, but you probably still saw a few of them in depending on where you were. Um, so are we done with military type stuff? I was going to talk about plate armor. You want to talk about plate armor just a little bit. Go ahead in the iron is still king. Yes, you're gonna see a lot of iron armor. You're not

going to see very much steel. Steel was being made, but it was incredibly difficult to make. UM. To make steel, you had to heat iron up quite quite hot, introduce carbon into it, but not too much carbon, because if you put too much carbon in it, you got pig iron, which is not great for armor. As it turns out, kind of shatters um details one enough carbon in there to make the iron hard, but not so much that it becomes brittle. Has to still be malleable. So steel

is actually pretty complicated. It's really expensive. UM. Most armor is made out of iron. But at this point you do see full plate suits of armor, and full plate that means that there's there these various hinged plates that cover the entire body UM that provide as much freedom of movement as possible while still providing as much protection as possible, and full plate armor depending on you know what kind of the quality of the iron or steel

that was used to make it. Could even ward off a shot from an arquebus at the right range if you're right up close to someone, chances are that SHOT's gonna go right through the armor and into you, which is bad news. But um, but that's still in. It was still fairly common to see soldiers wearing this kind of armor because the guns had not reached a point of sophistication where they had rendered it completely obsolete, and Henry the Eighth himself was known to wear it quite

a few times. He actually entered a lot of attorneys um secretly in fact, uh, in fact, I think a year after he was coronated, he entered a tournament in secret and gained quite a bit of respect because he was a very gifted combatant. Wow, yeah, I had no idea. Yeah, not a great wrestler. But King of France beat him in a wrestling match that was at the the Fields

of Cloth and Gold. Alright, now I'm done with the military stuff, okay, Because one one technology that I found that was apparently created fairly close to fifteen ten was the watch. Yes by Germany's Peter henlen Um. He was in a Nurnberg, Germany and um, which at that point

wasn't technically Germany because Germany didn't technically exist as a country. Um. But some people say that I actually I had seen reports that it was in fact invented like the pocket watch invented in but there appeared to have been prototypes existing as early as maybe fifteen o five or so. That's pretty close. And again, this is something that I think of is having been around since, you know, forever and ever, so to speak in the case of this.

But uh no, the the watches starting to make its appearance around the early sixteenth century, I imagine they would be very expensive and probably not very reliable. And the secret to the watch was the fuse, which is uh this is a little complicated. It's kind of hard to explain. But a watch is the thing that powers these classic watches as a spring inside the watch, and uh around the spring is a barrel. When the spring is wound tight, it then turns the barrel. So attached to this barrel

is a little chain. The chain goes to a cone that has um grooves in it. Yeah, all right, So the attaches to at the top of the cone and the chain winds around all the way to the base of the cone. All right. As the spring unfurls and the barrel turns, it pulls the chain from this Uh, this fuse, this cone and the chain goes from the top down to the bottom. And once it gets to the bottom, that's when your watch has needs to be wound again. When you wind it, you're actually winding that

chain around the cone again. This is what provides the power to the watch hands to to go around the clock face. Earliest earlier clocks, by the way, I only had one hand. They had one hand that indicated where in the hour it was, so you still had the twelve numbers, but you would look and if the hand was between the you know, one and the two, you'd think, all right, well it's about one thirty. It's about as

as close as you would get. Um. But yeah, that's the fuse is what allowed both pocket watches and you know, table clocks to exist because before that you had to use weights to to power the clock. Theist watch came around much much later, Yeah, swatch even later. Imagine. Yeah, Um, another technology I was thinking about that would have been it had been out for a few decades, but you know that the movable type Gutenberg. Yes, so we're going

back to fourteen fifty five or so. Yeah, yeah, but you know it was making an impact and and was spreading very rapidly around the turn of the century. Now, movable type was new to the Western world, although in China they had they had had movable type for a few centuries, but um, but then in it did really revolutionize learning in medieval Europe. Of certainly made printing much more inexpensive. Right up to that point, you essentially would get printing by hiring monks to write a text for you.

And that's where you got those beautiful illuminated scripts where it was amazing calligraphy, and you know, you figured that they must have been paid by the brushstroke. But the the movable type, yea, you took a lot of the maybe the artistry out of it. But in turn you made it much easier to produce lots and lots of copies.

And so that that's really what propelled the whole renaissance in all of Europe, was the fact that you suddenly had this this easy access, relatively easy access to printed works. You know, althy're thinking about it. If the monks are copying a book word for word, wouldn't that be a form of desktop publishing. So anyway, uh, let's talk about a true renaissance. Man, Yes, Leonardo da Vinci, since I truly messed up the Renaissance. Uh, you should have stopped me.

How did I how did you mess up the Renaissance? Well, then we weren't talking about anyway. The Renaissance man Leonard's Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci, of course was towards the end of his life. Yes, yes, he died in fifteen nineteen. Um, he was, uh a real genius. I mean not just an amazing artist, but an inventor. And of course he had that great code. So anyway, and then actually, and actually it turns out it was around uh some of the time when he was coming up with scientific ideas,

he wasn't doing as much painting. He was teaching that. He did do the Mona Lisa towards that time period, but he had already done the Last Supper, and um, yeah he was. He was thinking of inventions. He had already kind of come up with the whole idea about powered flight, which never worked during his lifetime. But he did work out the basic principles of things like lift, which no one had really managed to do up to that point. Um, around fifteen he actually drew the first

documented sketch of a fetus in the womb. Yeah, seven months old, I did that was the fetus his age. Leonardo was significantly older than that. I didn't notice that that period two was when he was really in did in the Anatomy of the human body, So that makes sense that that would have been was a little after he had drawn the Vitruvian Man, which is the infamous painting that he did to show the proportions of the

human body. Did you know that for most people, the length of your pinkie is the same as the length of your nose if you lay it down on the bridge of your nose. Yeah, you know who? I learned that from Leonardo da Vinci really well, at least the one that works at the Georgia Renaissance Festival. I did, um, hey Houston, how are you doing so? But yeah, this time he also invented, at least according to the sources I was reading, a horizontal water wheel, which is kind

of the the precursor to the turbine. Again, these are inventions that actually existed in other parts of the world, but in Europe were unheard of at the time. And uh also ball bearings, scissors. I was brilliant, so it have made a fortune. He could have. He got into a lot of trouble too. But he also he also drew up UH an invention which was never actually built. A lot of Leonardo's inventions were never built. They were just sketches or concepts. But he came up with a

concept that would have essentially been the first tank. It was an armored vehicle to protect people withinside during warfare, and I think that's pretty impressive. A lot of his inventions had to do with various UH kinds of warfare. He also drew up plans for an enormous crossbow was according to some estimates, supposed to be as as wide as a hundred feet. Well, the crossbow was already falling out of fashion. The regular crossbow was calling out of

fashion thanks to you know, the arquebus. I wanted to say that again, Yes, the crossbow was a very slow way of killing your rhynomes, but but I imagined that Leo's version, being much larger, would have more of an effect. Yeah. Again, it was never built, but it was definitely one of those things that you took a look at the design and you thought, wow, I hope nobody gets ahold of one.

Of these things because if they do I want to move, you would have gotten the point and other The interesting thing about the Middle Ages and especially around this time, is that how slowly technology actually evolved. I mean you part of that is just because again before movable type,

it was really hard to to pursue learning. It took real polymaths like da Vinci or uh, you know, other geniuses at the time or in other parts of the world to really push things forward, which meant that you know, you pretty much had to wait because there was just there was no way to dedicate your life to that kind of thing. Most schools were of a religious nature, where you would learn math, and you would learn languages,

you would learn philosophy, learn lots of important things. But it wasn't really you know, you weren't learning to be an engineer. You know, you learned on the job. If you wanted to be something like that, like an architect, you you would become an apprentice and learn your trade

that way. Um, so progress was very slow. It wasn't until really the early Renaissance, when the the the printed word was really coming into full play, that you started to see the explosion and learning and then the rapid development of technology. Wow, you know, and I feel like as with as much as we talked about, you know, we're sort of running out of time here, but uh, you know, there's still far more that we could cover. Of course, this is the stuff that our sister podcast

usually talks about. Yeah, and speaking of which, recently, stuff you should know, recorded a podcast about castles, So if you have, if you have not had your fill of medieval tech, I recommend you check that out because yeah, the Castle's podcast. I'm sure we'll be really really interesting. I haven't heard it yet because they recorded it about an hour before we recorded this and I was not

in the room. So um, but hopefully in that that that kind of fills that that need to hear stuff about Renaissance fairs and and create the Society of Creative Anachronism. That's s c A. Uh not really our field, but we decided to try try and tackle it anyway, although some of them have been spotted by the Google street view cameras. That's true, that's true. Yeah, we could way to rope that in. If any of you have any questions, hopefully dealing with technology, you can shoot us an email.

That's tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and you might think, well, gosh, is any of this on the website? Actually yes, How Iron and Steel Work is an excellent article uh CO written by Marshall Brain and Robert Lamb. I recommend that it's a great article on the site if you want to learn more about the history of iron and steel. And we will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does stuff works dot com and sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on

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