Chess

Chess originated in India in the 6th century AD. “Check” and “checkmate” were added into the game by the persians. The Muslims changed the pieces into abstract objects instead of people and animals. Under Christan influence the pieces became people and animals once again. Chess teaches military strategy and math skills. Pawns represent standard infantry (foot soldiers), knights are the main attacker, the bishop represents a church clergyman, the rook represents a fortified offensive, the queen is the strongest piece in the game, the king is the most important piece. Chess is full of possible strategies especially thanks to promotion Chess spread to Europe by the Muslims through Spain and the Byzantine Empire. It spread because of its social and military value.  

Arquebus 

The arquebus began as the hand cannon in China in the 13th century. They were simple, a barrel and a handle, and a series of innovations improved the hand cannon. Early versions weren’t effective long-range weapons; stronger guns were needed by the 15th century to penetrate plate armor. The arquebus is the ancestor of the musket and rifle. Its accuracy was greatly improved over previous efforts It was also much more powerful than the hand cannons. It made warfare cheaper. The king of Hungary was the first to heavily stock his army. 25% of his army carried an arquebus. It was quicker to train soldiers to fire than to learn archery. 

Printing Press

China invented woodblock printing in the 700s AD. Movable type was in Asia by the 1200s AD. By the 1400s, Europe had paper and high labor costs associated with scribes. Johan Gutenberg applied his knowledge of metalworking to invent the printing press. It is the single most important invention faster and cheaper in the last l,000 years. Books could now be printed faster and cheaper. 3,600 pages a day could be printed and about 10 books. It had little impact in Asia. The printing press spread rapidly throughout Europe. 

Mainspring 

English Longbow

The English longbow was as tall as it’s archer. It required a lot of strength and skill to wield the English longbow. In order to have the strength and skill to wield the longbow training began when the archers were young boys and as the boys grew so did their longbow to match their height. The English longbow fired 300 yards 6 arrows per minute. The arrows could penetrate armor.  Demand for wood to make the longbow depleted forests all over continental Europe. England purchased over 12 million arrows for their bows in 18 years. English laws were passed making archery practice mandatory. Then Guns began replacing the bow by the 1600s.

Blast Furnace

The earliest blast furnaces were probably developed in China 2,000 years ago but they didn’t spread in adoption. The first big advance in bloomery design occurred in Spain in the 700s AD. Iron that got too hot in a bloomery turned into pig iron which was hard to refine. Water-powered bellows helped force enormous air volume into the bloomeries which made them very hot. The  first blast furnaces appeared in Switzerland and Sweden around 1300 AD. The blast furnace converts iron ore pig iron effently.     

Plate Armor

Chain mail had been around for centuries and was an effective defense against medieval weapons but it was expensive and labor intensive to make. But then a coat of metal plates evolved during the 1200s it was gradually refined to become more form-fitting and to cover more parts of the body. The first suits of plate armor were developed by 1420 AD. It protected the knight from most kinds of attacks, even arrows. Plate armor was light and flexible so the knights could run, jump and pretty much do what they can do without the armor. It’s use declined in the 1600s. 

   Spurs 

No one knows when the spur was invented. Early versions were worn by the Greeks and Romans. The spur began to take on its modern form in England in the 13th century. It arose out of a desire to better communicate with your horse. Improves rider’s control over the horse. It increases the horse’s sensitivity to leg commands.

The Most Interesting Thing I Learned About This Week 

The most interesting thing I learned about this week is the spur because I got to learn a little bit more about the history of the spur because I use spurs all the time.

So this is a rowel spur I have at my house.

  This is my mom old barrel racing spur which is a lighter version of the spur it is a bumper spur.

     

Spectacles

 Old age was a threat to  the division of labor by putting people into premature retirement for bad vision. Old age was also frightening for scholars because monks and scholars made their livings based on their studies. The lens as a magnifying tool has been known since ancient times. A gradual increase in vision led to the first eyeglasses. Eyeglasses thwart the effects of old age on our vision. Robert Grosseteste a christain scholar made advances in studying the nature of light. 

Mechanical Clocks 

Life was much less orderly and regulated before the mechanical clock. By the 1200s a variety of tools were available for telling time there was the sundial, water clocks, and the hourglass. Water clocks were good but they froze in cold weather. The clock enables us to track much smaller time intervals than before. The hours of the day varied in length before the clock. Clocks began to regulate prayer time and the calendar. 

Paper Mills

The recipe and the paper-making process were known in Europe. The main ingredient was old linen rags. The spinning wheel increased demand for linen clothing but there was a problem with all the trash  (old linen clothes.) People began taking the old linen clothes and turning them into paper but then they sold it cheaply. 

The most interesting thing I learned this week and why

The most interesting thing I learned this week is the paper mills and how people used old linen rags to make paper.  

          

Buttons 

Clothing before buttons relied on heavy metal brooches, pins and cloth drawstrings. People did not use buttons or make them because buttons are smaller and were easier to lose also they were sewn on your shirt or pants whatever you could not move it. Unlike the pin or brooch where you could take them off and put them on another piece of clothing. Another reason is because they did not have plastic they had to make them out of metal which was expensive. This changed after the little ice age swept across Europe at that point it became important to have warm clothes. It turns out buttons made it easier to make warm clothing. It’s because buttons could fasten from fitting clothing to your body tightly and that helps improve keeping the heat. They were also used to  help fasten purses and other things like that. 

Oil Painting 

Tempera paint was the most common pant. It was made of egg yolks ( “ binder “) and pigment. Oil paint is more durable than tempera. Tempera is basely made of water like water paint. Tempera  was used in indoor painting and oil paint was used to paint stuff outside like painting a shield and if it rained the oil paint would not wash away like the tempera paint. Jan Van Eyck was the one who adapted oil paint to portraits and landscapes and moved the techniques of painting. 

Cannons 

 Cannon is a big gun meat to launch projectiles using gunpowder appeared by 1250 AD. They were more powerful and faster than trebuchet. The first cannon were probably used in span by the muslums against the Spanish. 

  Spinning Wheel

The spinning wheel is a belt driven device that makes thread to make cloth. Before the spinning wheel it was harder to make thread as fast as the cloth was being made. Also there was the fact that there was a lot of demand for the cloth. Inventions of the spinning wheel innovations in the loom made it faster to make high quality cloth but thread production could not keep up until the spinning wheel           

 But the spinning wheel helped making the thread eraser. 

The most interesting thing I learned about this week

The most interesting thing I learned about the week was about how the oil paint is more durable than the tempera paint . The reason I find this so interesting is because I use watercolor paint and sometimes oil paint. When I paint and if I can I will get my mom to paint too because she is really good (in my opinion). 

  

The counter weight Trebuchet  

The bisateen empire in the east had almost collapsed over some disorder and cayos. But a new emperor came in and stabilized the empire. The muslums were agitating the empire from the east one thing they did was capsher the city of Nicaea which the bisateen empire wanted to get back. They were all so generally concerned about the evasion from the muzlums. So they sent out a request to the pope of the western church as a call for help to help them fight the battles. It was that call for help and the and the popes preaching of sermons that anesheated the first crusade were western soldiers clergymen anybody who could move east to help fight the muzlums that were threatened invasion. The bizateen empire used the first counterweight trebuchet to retake Nicaea because it had walls it had thick heavy walls and they invented this trebuchet to break it down. The counterweight trebuchet evolved from the older version. It was called the contraction trebuchet and in that design a group of men would pull at the same time on several ropes in order to sling the arm up and launch the projectile (a stone ) and this was inspired by the little sling. You sling it around and then you throw a stone. It was used by the shepherds to protect their flocks from lions. The main benefit of the counterweight trebuchet was that hurl missiles of all kinds over several hundred feet and destroy thick walls thicker walls than a catapult could. The reason is because it takes advantage of a heavy weight and the effect of gravitate to a great swing force hurl these projectiles. 

Distilled Spirits 

   Wine and beer have been around since the dawn of creation. Distilled spirits represented the first true innovation in beer making or wine making and probably 5,000 years. A distilled spirit is a beverage that’s made of concentrated alcohol that is extracted from a fermed bevring like wine or beer. Now making hard licker or spirits rests upon the process of desolation which was probably invented by Mary the Juise. One of the first western practitioners of alcome around 200 AD. The process of distillation became the little tinker tool of alchemists. Alchemists were trying to figure out how to manipulate the elements corresponding to the planets in order to gain secret knowledge about the universe and transfer themselves into some kind of divine being. Well the main benefit of the spirits in general was that it could gladden the heart and it could improve your mood. 

Vertical Windmill

The first kind of windmill was the horizontal windmill and they were invented by the Persians. We do not know if the Europeans vertical windmill was inspired by the Persians. There is no evidence about that but it is just a guess. The main function of the windmill is to convert wind into energy into power. Then the windmill can operate mills and other machens in a town that is far from flowing water sources unlike the waterwheel which can do the only it is used in towns that are near flowing water sources like a river.

Stern- Mounted Rudder

The oversize steering wheel oar was the original method of steering but boats could not get that big in order to still be able to steer the boat because if the boats got too big it would be harder to steer the boat it could crash into rocks and other things. But the stern- mounted rudder changed that evan bouts changed. The back of the boat became flat in order to be able to mount the rudder on there.          

            Universities 

Education has been done with a system of tutor and tutelage. A tutor is someone who personally one on one teaches younger people whatever. That was the Greeks method of teaching. And after the Romans conquered the Greeks they started using that method but before that they let the fathers teach. The fathers taught their children the basics like reading, writing, how to count, and how to measure so they could transact business. The collapse of Rome threw the European world into an up evil and education was one of those things. The older stymies declined and one on one tutoring declined because people couldn’t really afford it anymore also the tutors in Rome where often Greek slaves. However the church was preserved through this decline of the Roman empire. The church had schools already. It had small schools to train young men how to become bishops and church offers. These were small schools where they taught young men how to read and write. It was the conflict between the pope and the Emperor over who should have the authority to appoint bishops.The bishop of Rome was the most powerful of all the bishops and that later became the pope. The bishop of Rome stripped the power to appoint bishops from the Emperor and when he did that he also was placing himself at the top and putting all the other churches beneath him. But to do that he needed to hire more bureaucrats because in order to centralize a very large institution like that and over a wide geographic. You have to have  many levels and layers of bureaucracies and higher acre and all of a sudden there is more demand for these bureaucrats then there was a supply of them to the invention of the universities. The universities were basically a larger version of the older church school. Some of them even became universities. But in the university a young man could get a bachelor of arts degree or a masters of arts degree. The universities were training young bureaucrats. To be a bureaucrat you have to follow ridged procedures and to obey orders. The second function of the university was to protect the teachers from the free market. In the beginning young men paid the teachers to teach them if they did not know how they were teaching them they could fire them. The teachers came together and organized a geld to protect them from the free market forces and that geld was the renovated university model. One of the first universities was the the university of Paris. That was a geld ( a university) formed by the teachers and from then on out the students payed the universities and then the university then paid the teachers but the teachers but the teachers didn’t have to be held directly accountable to the students and the students lost their authority over the teachers they could no longer hire and fire them at will. They had to go to the university and then take the classes that the university accented them.

Wine Press

Wine making has been handed down since the dawn of mankind and various tools too. The first thing that Noah did after he got off the arc. He built a wine vineyard and made wine and he got that knowledge from his ancestors . The common method for making wine is to crush up grapes and then extract their juice and let them ferment. The basic way to crush grapes is to crush them with your feet. And let the grape juice flow into a vat. But even now and then particularly better tools have been used to help improve this process. The Egyptians had the bag press which helped a little bit. Rome made sophisticated wine presses but they did not use them much because of the fact that they were too expensive to build and probably because of the abundance of slave labor. It was the monks who lived using the wine press. The monks used them all the time they served the lord’s supper which was bread and wine. The design that the monks used was called the basket press and that’s basically the same design we use today.

Ribbed Vault 

The Roman arch style was copied from Greece but the style faded after Rome collapsed. The ribbed vault allowed very high selling you could put lots of windows and decorate the place. It evolved from elere vault styles. First there was the simple barrel vault and after that a groin vault. 

Chimney 

 The large houses used to have a hole in the roof. It was open to the night sky and not the entire roof they would have it in certain areas of the roof. But when it got colder people abandoned that style. It was this problem that helped create the early chimney like devices into these large houses into the form of the modern chimney.      

           

The Four Islamic Scholars

Al – Razi   

Al – Razi discovered smallpoxs and how they are different than measles they might have some of the same symptoms but they are two different desisis. He also performed some surgeries and a kidney stone removal.

Al- Hazen 

Al – Hazen came up with the theory of eyesight. There were two competing theories of vision. One of the theories was by Plato his theory about eyesight was the emission theory. The emission theory is that a light ray is produced inside our eyeballs. They exit our eyeballs so then the ray strikes a foren object and when the ray strikes an foren object that is what produces an image in our mind.

 Aristotle’s theory was the intromission theory. It was about how objects enter our eyes and not exit our eyes. But Al- Hazen rejected Plato’s theory. Al- Hazen used his own insights. And got an idea from Al- Kinadi. Al- Kinadi was the peronit of the intromission theory. but nevertheless Al-Hazen  used his own intellect to come up with a new kind of intromission theory. This new intromission theory was how instead of one ray there was more than one ray created by different point sources for the object. The multiple rays inter your eye at a single point. Al-Hazen wrote hundreds of books. He made significant contributions to the field of optics and human esperamanton. 

Al-Khwaizmi 

Al-Khwarizmi discovered algebra. The process algebra is the balance of numbers from the equation. Add a number to one side of the equation and to the other side of the equation or subtracting from both sides of the equation, multapling, dividing to both sides of of the equation he would do that and then simplify the equation to solve the unknown.

Al- kindi 

Al- kindi used frequency analis with cryptanalysis. 

Aristotelian physics and the focus on the heavenly circles held back the Islamic scholarship from full science as we know it today.             

The collapse of the Roman empire led to the creation of a wide variety of glass styles like forest glass. The Roman empire had been making glass for hundreds of years so they had lots of experience making glass they also had natron but the glass they made was clear and thin. 

After the collapse of the Roman empire people closer to Rome  did not have to worry about making glass because it was still being produced. But people farther away from the Roman empire was worrying more about framing and staying alive than making glass. 

 The demand for glass increased people father away from Rome started experimenting new styles of glass They used the materials they had on hand to make forest glass since they did not have natron.   

 The Horse Collar 

My favorite invention is the horse collar because it was so interesting to learn about how it was invented by the Chinese in a series of refinements like the breastcollar it helped distribute the load around the horse’s breast which helped them to start pulling the load. Then soon the horse’s collar had been refined to maximize the horses benefits basically to use all of the horse’s strength. And before the invention of the horse collar it was hard for the horse to work the harder they worked the harder it became to breathe because of the ox yoke.   

My great grandpa had mules and so he had lots collars for them I actually got to hold one of the collars in my hand.  My great grandpa evan had chuckwagon we still have it in the bran today. My other great grandparents had a buckboard wagon we have it down in central Taxes today.

                 

ox yoke

Buckboard wagon

horse collar

Chuckwagon

The effect that numerous small inventions have on a culture over time are significant. Examples are the wheelbarrow, soap, the heavy plow, and stirrups.  

  Before the wheelbarrow, man was limited to how much they could carry and it was more labor intensive. After the invention of the wheelbarrow it was easier for man to haul small to medium heavy loads which then increased  society’s capital. 

Soap before it the Romans covered themselves in oil then scraped it off. After the invention of soap people did not get sick as much so then they could work more. 

Before the heavy plow it was harder to plow the fields that have more harder clay like soil. But after the invention of the plow it was easier to farm the land that had the harder clay like soil. Which then more fields could be plated so then there could be more people in the community. 

Stirup before the invention of it people used chariots after that they made it where you could only put your big toe in. Then they made it where it was on only one side of the saddle so you could only use it to get up on the horse it was harder to stay on the horse when you are going fast. But then it was made to where there is another stirup on the other side.