Talk:Fausto Veranzio

Fausto Veranzio (circa 1551 – January 17, 1617) was a polymath and bishop.

Life

Family history

Fausto was born in Sibenik (or Sebenico)

• A collection of modern and contemporary voyages & travels, Oxford University, 1805
• Abbe Albert Fortis, Travels Into Dalmatia, 1768

He was a member of the noble family of counts Veranzio or conti Verantii (a branch of which later merged with Draganich family, creating the Counts Draganich-Veranzio), a notable family of writers.

He was the son of Michele Veranzio, a Latin poet, and the nephew of Antun Vrancic/Antonio, archbishop of Esztergom (1504–1573), a diplomat and a civil servant.

• Memoirs of the court of Augustus: continued, and completed, from the original papers of the late Sir Thomas Blackwell John Mills, University of Aberdeen, Printed for A. Millar, 1753

Fausto's mother was from the House of Berislavic family. His brother, Giovanni, died still young in battle.

While the family's main residence was in city of Sibenik, they owned a big summer house on island Prvic, in place Sepurine, a neighboring place to Prvic Luka (where he is buried in local church). The baroque castle that was used by Vrancic family as summer residence is now in possession of family Draganic.

Education and political activities

As a youth, Veranzio was interested in science. Still a child, he moved to Venice, where he attended schools, and then to Padua to join the University of Padua, where he focused on law, physics, engineering and mechanics.

At the court of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor/King Rudolf II, in Hradcany Castle, in Prague, Veranzio was chancellor for Hungary and Transylvania often in contact with Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe. After his wife's death, Veranzio left for Hungary. In 1598, he got the title of Episcŏpus Csanadiensis in partibus (even if he never set foot in Csanád). In 1609, back in Venice, he joined the brotherhood of Paul of Tarsus/Saint Paul of Tarsus and committed himself to the study of science. Veranzio died in 1617 in Venice and was buried in Dalmatia, near his family's countryhouse.

Polymath and inventor

Veranzio's masterwork, Machinae Novae (Venice 1595), contained 49 large pictures depicting 56 different machines, tools/devices, and technical concepts.

Two variants of this work exist, one with the "Declaratio" in Latin and Italian, the other with the addition of three other languages. Only a few copies survived and often do not present a complete text in all the five languages. This book was written in Italian, Spanish, French and German.

The tables represent a varied set of projects, inventions and creations of the author. There Veranzio wrote about water and solar energy, the universal clock (Plates 6–7), several types of mills, agricultural machinery, various types of bridge in various materials, machinery for clearing the sea, a dual sedan traveling on mule (Plate 47), special coaches, and Homo Volans (Plate 38) a forerunner of the parachute. His work included a portable boat (Plate 39), that is say a boat that, thanks to the same energy as the current may go against the river (Plate 40). It was his idea to use the printing rotary principle (e.g. grinding them printers, Plate 46) in order to alleviate the great difficulty of printers and improve results.

Despite the extraordinary rarity of this book (because the author published it at his own expense, without a publisher and having to stop printing because of lack of funds), the Machinae Novae was the work which mainly contributed to Veranzio's popularity around the world. His design pictures were even reprinted a few years later and published in China.

Veranzio's parachute

One of the illustrations in Machinae Novae is a sketch of a parachute dubbed Homo Volans ("The Flying Man"). Having examined Leonardo da Vinci's rough Sketch of a parachute, Veranzio designed a parachute of his own.

Paolo Guidotti (about 1590) already attempted to carry out Da Vinci's theories, ending by falling on a house roof and breaking his thigh bone; but while Francis Godwin was writing his flying romance The Man in the Moone", Fausto Veranzio performed a parachute jumping experiment for real.

He is considered the first man to build and test a parachute: in 1617, now over sixty-five years old, he implemented his design and tested the parachute by jumping from St Mark's Campanile in Venice. This event was documented some 30 years after it happened in a book written by John Wilkins, the secretary of the Royal Society in London.

Mills

His areas of interest in engineering and mechanics were broad. Mills were one of his main point of research, where he created 18 different designs. He envisioned windmills with both vertical and horizontal Axis of rotation/axes, with different wing constructions to improve their efficiency. The idea of a mill powered by tides incorporated accumulation pools filled with water by the high tide and emptied when the tide ebbed, simply using gravity; the concept has just recently been engineered and used.

Urbanist and engineer in Rome and Venice

Drawing of suspension cable-stayed bridge by Fausto Veranzio in his Machinae Novae

By order of the Pope, he spent two years in Rome where he envisioned and made projects needed for regulating rivers, since Rome was often flooded by the Tiber river. He also tackled the problem of the wells and water supply of Venice, which is surrounded by sea. Devices to register the time using water, fire, or other methods were envisioned and materialized. His own sun clock was effective in reading the time, date, and month, but functioned only in the middle of the day.

The construction method of building metal bridges and the mechanics of the forces in the area of statics were also part of his research. He drew proposals which predated the actual construction of modern suspension bridges and cable-stayed bridges by over two centuries. The last area was described when further developed in a separate book by mathematician Simon de Bruges (Simon Stevin) in 1586.

Lexicography

Veranzio was the author of a five-language dictionary, Dictionarium quinque nobilissimarum Europæ linguarum, Latinæ, Italicæ, Germanicæ, Dalmatiæ, & Vngaricæ, published in Venice in 1595, with 5,000 entries for each language: Latin, Italian, German, the Dalmatian language and Hungarian. These he called the "five noblest European languages" ("quinque nobilissimarum Europæ linguarum").

The Dictionarium is a very early and significant example of both Croatian and Hungarian lexicography, and contains, in addition to the parallel list of vocabulary, other documentation of these two languages. In particular, Veranzio listed in the Dictionarium 304 Hungarian words that he deemed to be loanword/borrowed from Croatian. Also, at the end of the book, Veranzio included Croatian language versions of the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, the Ave Maria and the Apostles' Creed.

In an extension of the dictionary called Vocabula dalmatica quae Ungri sibi usurparunt, there is a list of Proto-Croatian words that entered the Hungarian language. The book greatly influenced the formation of both the Croatian and Hungarian orthography; the Hungarian language accepted his suggestions, for example, the usage of ly, ny, sz, and cz. It was also the first dictionary of the Hungarian language, printed four times, in Venice, Prague (1606), Pozsony/Pozun (1834) , and in Zagreb,in 1971. The work was an important source of inspiration for other European dictionaries such as an Hungarian and Italian dictionary written by Bernardino Balli, a German Thesaurus polyglottus by Humanism/humanist and lexicographer Hieronim Megister, and multilingual Dictionarium septem diversarum linguarum by Peterus Lodereckerus of Prague in 1605.

History and philosophy

Only a few of Veranzio's works related to history remain: Regulae cancellariae regni Hungariae and De Slavinis seu Sarmatis in Dalmatia exist in manuscript form, while Scriptores rerum hungaricum was published in 1798. In Logica nova ("New logic") and Ethica christiana ("Christian ethics"), which were published in a single Venetian edition in 1616, Veranzio dealt with the problems of theology regarding the ideological clash between the Protestant Reformation/Reformation movement and Catholicism. Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) and the Archbishop of Split Marco Antonio de Dominis (1560–1624) were his intellectual counterparts.

Lost works

Veranzio published some of his last works under the name "Giusto Verace". Some of them were never printed, left in the form of manuscripts. Some were sold to stay in big archives in the capitals of Austria or Hungary, while some were lost forever.

Legacy

When Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Austrian-British philosopher and mathematician, moving from Berlin to England, began studying mechanical engineering in 1908, he was highly influenced by his reading of Renaissance technical treatises, particularly Veranzio's Machinae Novae.

The 17th century Brooklyn Tidal Mill in Long Island (NY), one of the most popular and few still standing mills in the New York City area, was built after the plan of Fausto Veranzio.

Today, one of the oldest astronomical societies in Croatia bears the name "Faust Vrančić", as does a Croatian Navy rescue ship, as well as many schools in Croatia.

References

• Great machines Volume 69, Franz Engler, illustrated CIPIA, 1997 (University of Michigan) p. 4-14
• "Bridges and men", Joseph Gies, Doubleday, University of Michigan, 2009
• Aspects of Materials Handling‎ Dr. K.C. Arora, Vikas V. Shinde - Firewall Media, 2007, ISBN 8131802515
• Instruments in art and science: on the architectonics of cultural boundaries Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, Jan Lazardzig - Literary Criticism, 2008
• Sugar and society in China: peasants, technology, and the world market S. Mazumdar - Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge Mass. 1998, ISBN 067485408X,
• Engineering in history‎, Richard Shelton Kirby, Technology & Engineering, 1990
• Means and Methods Analysis of a Cast-In-Place Balanced Cantilever Segmental Bridge: Veranzio’s Machinae Novae Gunnar Lucko - Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2000
• American building art: the nineteenth century, Carl W. Condit, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS - page 163:
• The birth of modern science The making of Europe, P. Rossi, Wiley-Blackwell, 2001 ISBN 9780631227113
• Water architecture in the lands of Syria: the water-wheels
• The Italian Achievement: An A-Z Over 1000 'Firsts' Achieved by Italians in Almost Every Aspect of Life Over the Last 1000 Years A. Baron Renaissance, 2008 University of California ISBN 1898823553391
• History of Technology History of Technology, Graham Hollister-Short. A brief history of the technology through the centuries. The author is Honorary Lecteur of the Imperial College of London
• Charles Joseph Singer, A History of Technology, Charles Singer (British historian of science and medicine)
• Dizionario bibliografico degli uomini illustri della Dalmazia, Šime Ljubić
• Archibald Montgomery Low, Parachutes in peace and war, Archibald Low (English consulting engineer, research physicist and inventor, called "the father of the radio guidance systems"), 1942
• Medieval religion and technology: collection of essays (1978), Lynn Townsend White, Jr./Lynn Townsend, professor of medieval history at Princeton, Stanford and UCLA.
• Anthropological series, (vol. 18), Field Museum of Natural History, Field Columbian Museum.
• Technology and culture, Society for the History of Technology, vol. 9, 1968
• Design paradigms: case histories of error and judgment in engineering Henry Petroski CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1994 ISBN 9780521466493
• Technological concepts and mathematical models in the evolution of modern engineering systems: controlling, managing, organizing, Mario Lucertini, Ana Millán Gasc, F. Nicolò, Birkhäuser, 2004, ISBN 376436940X
• Histoire des sciences mathématiques en Italie: depuis la renaissance des lettres jusqu'à la fin du dix-septième siècle Ghent University, 1848
• Musei per la scienza - Science museums L.B.Peressut, Pub. Lybra imagine, (illustrated) 1998, ISBN 8882230333
• Fausto Veranzio - Innovatore

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• No4 ref: Berthold Laufer, The Prehistory of Aviation Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, University of Michigan, 1928.

The above: Veranzio's parachute ref (does not mention Croatia ???)

• This is odd: "Fausto was born Šibenik", then in ref Today Šibenik, Croatia. Cfr.