Renaissance Scientists - Part I

Ever questioning minds is something that is gifted at birth to just about every child. Yet, somehow in most cases, we manage to thwart this natural tendency in our children. As a mother and grandmother, this fact is one that I think about a lot.

Perhaps, it is our need to protect our children from what we perceive as "dangerous" experimentation. Perhaps it is our educational system, that cares more about fitting children into little well behaved slots of "normalcy" or expected behaviors that kills the natural questioning minds of children.

All I know is that most scientists have that special variety of "ever questioning minds" and for that we should be grateful.

Let's Look At The Greatest Ever Questioning Minds

Before naming names -- no discussion of the men of science of the Renaissance times, would be complete without pointed out an obvious set of facts. Practical chemistry, including the arts of making dyes, paints, glass, pottery, and other useful things were developed long ago by the Egyptians and other ancient peoples.

The theoretical side of chemistry did not develop as early as the practical, and the early theories seem rather wild to us today.

For hundreds of years many men gave up their lives to the study of alchemy, a kind of chemistry whose chief object was to change (or transmute) cheap metals to gold. The alchemists believed that gold was the most perfect of metals and that if one could only find the right formula one could achieve enormous wealth by changing lead, tin, silver, mercury, or even iron into yellow gold.

They also believed that the "philosopher's stone" had these strange and magical powers.

During the Middle Ages many so-called alchemists wandered from country to country. some were scientific experimenters. Some were rogues who disappeared in the night with the treasures entrusted to them for their experiments.

Emperors and kings were among the alchemists. Many of the unfortunate alchemists were executed by kings for whom they had promised to make gold. Once prince even built a special gold gilded hanging gallow devoted entirely to hanging alchemists.

On feature of the Renaissance was this -- many of its greatest minds were great in more than one field.

Michelangelo, for instance, was both sculptor and painter. Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist, inventor and scholar, has often been called a typical man of the Renaissance because he excelled in so many ways. His was a questioning mind, ever seeking more knowledge.

In Leonardo's time, a man's first name was usually his only formal name, except among the great houses where family names were used. Leonardo was born in the little Tuscan town of Vinci, and so he came to be called Leonard do (from Vinci).

When he was a boy he showed a skill in art, so he was apprenticed to Verrocchio, a painter, sculptor, and goldsmith of Florence. Leonardo lived and worked in Florence for almost twenty years.

He became a member of the Painters' Guild, one of the foremost organizations of the day. Artists of the time generally sought the patronage of kings or other rich persons. While in Florence, Leonardo enjoyed the favor of Lorenzo the Magnificent, head of the house of Medici, a bountiful, intelligent and sympathetic patron of the arts.

For twenty-five years after that, Leonardo lived at the court of Milan, working for the duke, Ludovico Sforza. At Milan, however, he worked more as an engineer than as painter.

The last years of Leonardo's life were spent in France, under the patronage of Francis I, and it was in this country that he died.

Leonardo felt that he needed an exact knowledge of anatomy to be a fine painter. Since there were no good pictures of the structure of the body in existence, he many many for himself from careful studies.

His anatomical drawings are so beautiful that they are considered to be works of fine art, and so accurate that they could be used as illustrations in textbooks today.

Leonardo made a vast number of scientific studies but he wrote down very little about his scientific research. Sir Willam Dampier thought that if Leonardo had published his work, "science must at one step have advanced almost to the place it reach a century later." Few people would disagree with that observation.

For example, a hundred years before Harvey re-discovered it, it seems that Leonardo already understood the principle of circulation of the blood.

Like some of the Greeks long before him, he recognized the true nature of fossils and he pointed out that the presence of fossils of salt-water animals in high mountains shows that the mountains must once have been below sea level.

Leonardo's keen imagination foreshadowed many of the great inventions of recent times. He understood the impossibility of "perpetual motion."

He experimented with gliders and some authorities believe that if the gasoline engine had been developed in Leonardo's day, he would have invented the airplane.

While Leonardo's tireless brain was busy with a thousand new projects and inventions, a Polish astronomer, Copernicus was patiently working on an epoch-making theory of the universe.

He cast aside the theory of Ptolemy, who believed that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun revolved around it.

Copernicus came to the conclusion that the sun was the center of a vast "solar system" and that earth and the other planets moved around the sun.

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastes von Hohenheim was the first great chemist (and also one of the first great physicians) of the Renaissance.

As if he had not been christened with enough names, he called himself Paracelsus, meaning better than Celsus, one of the ancient philosophers.

Although Paracelsus was also an astrologer and an alchemist and many of his ideas were mistaken -- he tired bravely to reform the crude medical practices of the time.

He was Swiss. When appointed lecturer at the University of Basel, Paracelsus celebrated the appointment by publicly burning the works of the ancient writers on alchemy and medicine.

He then announced his own superiority to the ancients and to most men of his own day. Apparently, in spite of his egotism, his methods really were superior to those of physicians of his time.

However, within a year the other doctors of Basel managed to have him driven from the city, and he spent most of his life wandering from place to place. Paracelsus died at fifty.

Bernard Palissy, a French potter and artist, famous more for the beautiful glazed earthenware he made, was also a scientist.

He was one of the first to realize that fossils are the remains of animals and plants.

He didn't have all the pieces put together, but his use of casting models from live specimens and some of his scientific opinions caused him a great deal of controversy and bought him time in prison.

Andreas Vesalius, was one of the first to make great progress in the study of the anatomy of the human body. Since the people of the Middle Ages considered it wicked to dissect a dead human body, nearly everything that was known about anatomy was based on the writings of Galen, an ancient Greek physician.

Vesalius, who was born in Brussels, Belgium dissected many animals. He also collected human bones from places of execution until he could put together a complete skeleton, a rare thing in those days.

He based his teachings on his own observations, and not merely the writings of Galen. He even claimed that Galen had described anatomy from the lower animals and not from man.

Vesalius became physician to Emperor Charles V and later to Philip II, King of Spain. One of his duties was to give public dissections, which he always did during winter so that the body would not putrefy during the three weeks the work required. He discovered the small branches at the ends of the arteries and veins, but did not realize the part they play in the circulation of the blood.

While returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Vesalius was shipwrecked on the island of Zante, where he died.

Thales, the Greek, in the sixth century B.C. knew that a lodestone would attract pieces of iron. However, it was Queen Elizabeth's physician, William Gilbert who discovered the greatest of all magnets.

He found that while the two poles of the magnetic needle pointed approximately north and south -- the north pole dipped downward in England and that the farther north one went the more the needle dipped.

From this he inferred that if one traveled far enough north, the needle would dip straight down.

He made a model of the earth from a sphere of iron, magnetized it by rubbing it with a lodestone, and found that when he brought a magnetic needle near it, the needle would come to rest dipping straight down at the poles of the model.

It would lie parallel to the model's surface at the Equator, and at intermediate angles at the points between the Equator and the Poles.

Gilbert came to the correct conclusion that the earth is a giant magnet. It was also Gilbert who gave electricity its name (from elektron, Greek for amber).

Another official under Queen Elizabeth, was Francis Bacon. Now, he had a lot of other names, or rather titles. He was also known as Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, and Lord Chancellor of England.

He was one of the the first to defend the experimental method as the very baiss of science.

Perhaps because he was kept so busy at his various political offices and by his writing, Bacon did almost no original scientific work himself. However, it was a scientific experiment which caused his death.

Wishing to learn whether cold would delay the decay of dead bodies, he bought a fowl and stuffed it with snow. While doing this in the cold air he was seized with a child (no doubt hypothermia) and died a few weeks later. Bacon lived from 1561 to 1626.