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.
People living in the Carpathian region would have had both the means and the motivation to create wheeled vehicles during this period, which is known as the Copper Age. As the name suggests, this was when metalworking first began, allowing tools to be made from copper rather than stone. (Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, was subsequently found to
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