Heather and I spend the weekend entertaining some friends from Kansas City.
We had a great time, but the combination of gloomy fall weather and a general goal of taking it easy meant there aren’t really any stories to tell, nor are there any interesting pictures.
This gives me a great opportunity to lay out a few of my thoughts after reading The Medieval Machine.
It was a pleasant surprise to find how much I learned from this book. Often I find nonfiction a little harder to read. (have I ever mentioned my every-other rotation goal of fiction/nonfiction? It’s been tougher to maintain than I had hoped.) Having established that I enjoyed learning, I really wanted to argue with the author at every turn about his conclusions and implications.
I suppose a quick summary might be helpful. The book covers the major mechanization of the middle ages (also sometimes called the dark ages). As it turns out, that period was full of advancement and progress, mostly around water and wind power. Access to non-manual forms of energy are easy to take for granted, and the book was eye-opening as it described all the tasks powered by falling water, grinding wheat, crushing ore, and conditioning fabrics, to name a few.
Another aspect that quickly became apparent is how much freedom I take for granted. The book was full of examples where the person who built a new mill was able to force everyone in the region to use it. This compulsion went so far in one case that the local governor sent troops door-to-door confiscating hand mills by sword point, leaving the peasants no way to grind flour except to use the governor’s new mill.
My frustration with the author started in the introduction where he stated with great confidence that there were no innovations left to be had that could significantly impact the course of human progress, and we were doomed to a slow decline… so stated in the year 1970. I may have been so put off by the introduction that I imagined most of my remaining gripes, but I couldn’t help but feel like the author wasn’t sure everything he was describing was actually a good thing. As if he felt that saving millions of man hours grinding wheat was somehow a loss.
In the end, the book made me spend a lot of time thinking. Thinking about the massive wealth of infrastructure we have, thinking about the impact of virtually unlimited access to information regarding nearly anything, and just marveling at how we got here from there.
Given the amount of thought and reflection it generated I find myself willing to forgive most of my gripes and say the book was a good read… although not one I am likely to read again.
-Jordan
Nelsons 
So glad you enjoyed the book. We found it thought provoking as well. I was also fascinated by the evolution of time-keeping. Another thing we take forgranted. Life was different before everyone lived by the clock–not sure if it’s better or worse, but it hasn’t been this way for much of history! The fact that they started out dividing the daylight hours into 12ths–with summer “hours” being longer than winter “hours” was especially interesting. We researched why they chose 24 hours to begin with, as this author didn’t say, and that was interesting as well. The ancient Egyptians did this with both hours and compass degrees since there are so many multiples of 12 that it made fractions easier AND they counted in base 12 because they used their thumbs to manually count each segment on the other 4 fingers and that came up to 12!
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