The Bookwheel, invented in 1588 by Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli, was a heavy, 600-pound wooden rotating bookcase that let scholars easily use up to eight open books at once. It had a clever gear system to keep the books upright as the wheel turned by hand, saving time for readers who didn’t have to fetch books from shelves. Featured in Ramelli’s book of machines, it was a creative Renaissance tool for studying, though it’s uncertain how many were actually made.
The Bookwheel, invented in 1588 by Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli, was a heavy, 600-pound wooden rotating bookcase that let scholars easily use up to eight open books at once. It had a clever gear system to keep the books upright as the wheel turned by hand, saving time for readers who didn’t have to fetch books from shelves. Featured in Ramelli’s book of machines, it was a creative Renaissance tool for studying, though it’s uncertain how many were actually made.
instagram.comThe zimbaldoni (which sound very much like commonplace books were effective at increasing the visibility of an author and helping to spread their work.
People would copy passages, share them with others, and they would in turn copy them.
I'm reminded of:
- social media (on a good day)
- ripped CDs
- mixtapes
- PDFS
- photocopies
- file-sharing like Napster
The story of how such vehicles transformed the world begins around 3500 B.C.E., with the invention of the wheel. It is an idea whose power seems obvious in retrospect. Yet the notion that the wheel is the greatest invention in history is recent.
“talking book” that could bring literature to a greater number of blind people. Irwin worked with a veteran electrical engineer in the industry, and by the mid-1930s, they’d designed a record that played at a slower 33⅓ rpm, was pressed on a tougher acetate material, and fit fifteen minutes of audio on a single side. (In his history of the audioboo
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