History of energy during the Renaissance

Summary: The Renaissance (1390–1700 c.e.) was a transition between the medieval period and the age of industrialization. Changes in technology, population, and resources would set the stage for the Industrial Revolution.

Despite improvements in machines using wind and waterpower, human and animal muscles still provided the bulk of the energy during the Renaissance. Animals continued to pull plows for agriculture and wagons for transport and commerce. In the 1400s, heavy draft horses (ancestors of the modern Percheron breed, for example) began to be used for farm labor in Europe. Their sturdiness and strength made agriculture more efficient.

Developments in ship and sail design enabled Europeans to use wind power to sail farther from home and develop trade routes and new sources of energy, such as wood from North America. The two new significant ship designs, both developed in the 1400s, were caravels and carracks. Caravels, developed by the Portuguese, had a limited cargo capacity (50 tons) but were slim, fast, and maneuverable, requiring a small crew and minimal supplies. This made them prime ships for exploration. Christopher Columbus’s Niña and Pinta (1492) were both caravels. Carracks, such as Columbus’s Santa Maria, had a length-to-width ratio of 3.5:1 or less, making them heavy but stable. They could have two to three decks, a good size for the time. There were three masts; the square-rigged main and foremast provided power, while the mizzenmast in the stern used a lateen (triangular) sail, later assisted by another lateen sail on the bowsprit, for controlling the ship. The main mast, which was as long as the ship, had two square sails, the mainsail and topsail, and the foremast had one square sail. This variety of sails greatly assisted navigation in narrow waters and did not require additional crewmen. Carracks could carry up to 1,000 tons of wheat, salt, and timber.

Using wind to power mills and ships had the advantage of preserving both wood and the food resources human energy required to cut down, transport, and process the wood. The ability to transport and trade resources and goods using wind-powered ships inexpensively in turn increased supplies and expanded production. In military applications, large, full-rigged sailing ships with guns, developed in the 1550s, helped defend seafaring nations against invasion and protected new trade routes.

Mills and Waterwheels

Wind could also be used to increase the food supply by making more land available, most famously in the Netherlands. Evidence of the first windmills points to their use in the 7th century in Iran and Afghanistan. In Europe, the first windmill appeared about 1180 in Normandy (now northern France). Windmills generally had two designs: the post mill and the tower mill, both of which used turbines and were developed in the 15th century. A turbine employs gas or water to spin a shaft, often attached to a turret. Such devices were the ancestors of turbines used in many of today’s energy applications, including electric generators, steamships, and jet aircraft. In the 15th century, turbines were mainly used as turnspit governors for roasting meat. As the fire got hotter, it produced more gas, turning the spit (and the roast attached to it) more rapidly. Leonardo da Vinci proposed using a centrifugal pump based on the turbine principle to drain swamps. In a tower mill, the mill mechanism was mounted in a revolving turret able to be turned without turning the whole structure. A vertical wheel, or Archimedes screw, was then used to lift water.

In the late 1300s, the Dutch began improving the tower mill’s design, boosting the available power to 30 horsepower (hp) per mill, which was greater than that of water mills. During the 1400s, the Dutch began to employ windmills to drain and maintain submerged lands, winning new farmland. By 1650, there were at least 8,000 Dutch windmills. Wind-powered mills, however, used a less reliable energy source, and water power, delivered by waterwheels, was also a significant power source during the Renaissance.

The waterwheel, which came to Western Europe in roughly 500 c.e., was an old technology, having been employed in ancient Greece (around 300 b.c.e.). As they had with wind technology, Renaissance engineers made improvements to waterwheels that made energy production greater and more efficient. Waterwheels were used for grinding corn, driving bellows and hammers, pulping rags for paper, crushing ore, and beating, tanning, and fulling cloth. While waterwheels did not lead to immediate industrialization, efforts to improve their components (by means of cams, cranks, gears, and flywheels) and apply them to powering established machines set off a wave of experimentation that would continue to produce new and more efficient machines. One example is the blast furnace.

Blast Furnaces

The water-powered blast furnace, imported from China, improved on the older design by using a vertical waterwheel to pump separate pairs of bellows to blow air into the furnace. This increased the draft and raised the temperature within the furnace, making it possible to cast molten iron into many forms, a process that would continue well into the industrial age. Remains of the oldest European water-powered blast furnace, thought to have operated before 1350, were found in Lapphytten, Sweden. By 1400, blast furnaces operated in the Rhine region, in Styria (Austria), and near Brussels, Belgium. In 1500, France built its first blast furnaces, and by 1600, there were 13 foundries producing cannons. Because of the reliability of water power, blast furnaces could run continually, for weeks or even months at a time. Also, the new furnaces produced more iron in more forms with less labor, reducing the price of products manufactured with iron, such as bells and cannons. Blacksmiths continued to produce tools, cauldrons, and other goods in small forges, but furnaces powered by water and later coal set the stage for the large-scale ironworks of the industrial age.

Energy Sources

Biomass energy, in the form of wood, continued to be a dominant power source during this period. The widespread use of coal in England that began in the 1600s pointed to the later shift to fossil energy. It was a response to a Europe-wide wood shortage, resulting from huge increases in the use of wood for shipbuilding and manufacturing. The blast furnaces mentioned above burned wood, and it was also the primary building material for housing and the main fuel in homes.

Europe’s leaders reacted in different ways. In 16th-century Tuscany, regulations restricted the cutting of trees near mountains, particularly certain kinds of trees, such as pines and elms. In 17th-century in France, an edict was issued in 1669 with the purpose of more rationally managing royal, municipal, and church-owned forests.

The Netherlands took a different approach, burning peat for fuel. Peat is similar to coal in that it is made of organic materials (plants), but it has not had time to solidify as much as coal, thus making it burn colder and not as efficiently. It is usually found in bogs and wetlands, often near the ocean. It became a major source of fuel in Ireland and Scotland, as well.

The most significant shift took place in England. As an island nation, it had to import wood from overseas, as it did from the New World, or turn to another native fuel source.

The Shift to Coal in England

Coal proved to be the fuel of choice, and it set the stage for a shift from renewable energy sources (such as wood, wind, and water) to fossil fuels (such as coal and oil), which drove the Industrial Revolution and has not been reversed since.

Coal was abundant in England and had been used before—for example, by the Romans, in monasteries in the 9th century, by smiths and brewers in 1239, and to heat homes in 1300. Shortages were also nothing new; England had suffered similar problems in the 13th century, but population losses in the 14th and 15th centuries allowed forests to regrow. By the 1500s, however, wood was once again in short supply, and England turned to coal, which had been avoided in the past because of its pungent smell.

Two key factors in the shift to coal were population growth and rising prices for wood. Energy-intensive industries such as brewing, glassmaking, and pottery works were among the first to begin burning coal, and households followed suit. Coal was cheaper than wood, as the sources were near coastlines and thus could be transported economically by sea; what we call coal was first called sea-coal for that reason. Coal was also more abundant than wood. At first, coal could be found near the Earth’s surface, and the minimal demand for it meant that digging deeper mines was unnecessary. This changed with the huge rise in coal demand, leading to an increase in mining in England in the 1600s. Keeping coal mines, which were often located in coastal areas, from flooding became a serious problem. Earlier efforts using animal power, such as a 16th-century device invented by the Pole Jacob Thurzo of Kracow, which used an animal treadmill to run a two-drum bucket chain to pump water out of silver mines, were not powerful or efficient enough.

Steam power offered a better solution, as it could remove water from mines without using muscular power. The steam engine, which would power the Industrial Revolution, took its first steps in the 17th century, developing from experiments seeking to create a vacuum for pumping. In 1606, Giambattista della Porta of Naples theorized that steam condensed inside a chamber would create a vacuum and built the first known experimental steam engine.

In 1673, the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens took a different tack, building a nonworking model of an internal combustion engine that used gunpowder to create a vacuum. In 1690, the French scientist and mathematicianDenis Papin experimented with the first atmospheric steam engine and designed the first piston engine. In 1698, the Englishman Thomas Savery developed a simple steam engine to pump water out of mines. Thomas Newcomen’s famous engine followed in 1712. James Watt would later improve the design in the late 1700s.

Gunpowder

While Huygens’s experiments failed to get off the ground, gunpowder was significant in a different way, having huge implications for military operations during the Renaissance. Weapons using chemical energy from the combustion of gunpowder would make old weapons and defenses obsolete and change the way wars were waged.

The earliest reference to gunpowder in Europe was in 1268, in the writings of Roger Bacon, an English Franciscan friar. Like many technologies (printing, shipbuilding, waterwheels, and so forth), gunpowder was originally developed in China, imported into Europe, and improved. The earliest gunpowder, so-called black powder, was a volatile and unpredictable mix of charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur. In China, it was used in fireworks, rockets, artillery, and guns, and it often exploded too early or not at all. Although the way that gunpowder first reached Europe (whether by missionaries, Muslim scientists, or Russian traders) is disputed, Europeans immediately began improving it. One of the first innovations was the process of corning, or granulation. Developed in the 1420s, this process pressed the gunpowder (dampened by urine, brandy, or vinegar) through a sieve to create granules, which were easier to handle and more reliable on the battlefield.

Gunpowder was used primarily in guns, known as arquebuses or muskets, and cannons. The primer charge was lit using a burning rope soaked in saltpeter (in a matchlock gun), spark from a flint (in a flintlock gun), or a spark from a wheel (in a wheel-lock gun). Cannons were fired in a similar way, but usually the rope was on the end of a long stick. Cannons at first fired stones, but later they used iron balls. Both iron cannons and cannonballs were made possible by improvements in the use of water power. By the 16th century, guns and cannons had replaced the crossbow and the catapult as the primary long-range weapons on the battlefield.

Conclusion

The Renaissance era would begin the processes that would lead to industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries. Engineers enabled greater exploitation of wind, water, wood, and coal resources by improving existing technologies such as windmills, waterwheels, furnaces, and gunpowder and inventing new devices such as the steam engine. Transportation, manufacturing, and populations all expanded, and the shift to coal in England heralded the age of fossil fuels.

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