GLOBAL HYDRAULICS
ANDREWS, Mark.
The Science and Engineering of Water. An illustrated Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts on Hydraulics north of the Alps and around the Globe 1400–1800.
Toronto, AE Publications, 2024.
Folio (310 x 235 mm), pp. [x], 427, [3]; with c. 800 illustrations; printed boards, with dust-jacket.
£85
US $112 €100
If you wish to order more than one copy of this publication please make an enquiry. Add to basket Make an enquiry
Added to your basket:
The Science and Engineering of Water. An illustrated Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts on Hydraulics north of the Alps and around the Globe 1400–1800.
An extensively illustrated catalogue of books, maps, and drawings on the science and engineering of water from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, utilised by practitioners in continental Europe, the United Kingdom, the New World, and East Asia.
A companion to Mark Andrews’s 2022 The Science and Engineering of Water: An illustrated Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts on Italian Hydraulics 1500–1800, and a valuable complement to his 2023 The Science and Engineering of Materials: A Theatre of Machine Books, 1472–1800, the present work draws on hundreds of books and manuscripts from the Andrews Collection of Civil Engineering, presenting a fascinating, chronologically ordered catalogue illuminating not only centuries’ worth of pioneering developments in the field of hydraulics, but also the intellectual networks through which these discoveries were disseminated.
Beginning with a fifteenth-century Dutch regulatory manuscript on the management of water resources and ending with Chinese overviews of river management and Samuel Wells’s important (though slightly later) maps and manuscripts on the draining of the Fens, the catalogue covers hydrodynamics and hydrostatics, works by Boyle, Kircher, and Bernoulli, and Japanese floodplain maps, as well as works on flood protection and coastal engineering, land drainage, canals, and hydraulic theory.
It is undoubtedly Andrews’s most ambitious – and visually striking – catalogue to date: spanning several continents, The Science and Engineering of Water, lavishly illustrated with some 800 illustrations, features an expanded glossary and six pages of maps illustrating Europe and the UK, the Iberian Peninsula, North and Central America, China, and Japan, highlighting canals, dikes, aqueducts, fluvial navigation routes, and marshlands connected to some thirty-seven individual items in the catalogue.
The substantial introduction provides a highly informative introduction to hydraulic theory, land reclamation in the Netherlands, the English Fens, and Mexico, canals and inland navigation, and hydraulic machinery, tying into a broader analysis of the growing demand for water management in urban environments and of the academic settings in which discoveries in hydraulics were transmitted, translated, and developed. The Science and Engineering of Water is an essential work for technical researchers as well as anyone interested in bibliography and book history and the history of hydraulics.
ISBN 978-1-7779394-2-7
