Buonaiuto Lorini

Bergamo city fortifications

Buonaiuto Lorini , also Bonaiuto, (* around 1545 in Florence , † around 1611 in Venice ) was an Italian architect and engineer (fortress and military engineer). His book on fortress construction also deals with machines of all kinds.

Lorini was born in Florence in the first half of the 16th century and came from a noble family. At the age of 22 he became a military engineer in the service of Cosimo I de 'Medici under Bernardo Buontalenti . In 1579 he was in the service of Venice . Around 1580 he became an engineer for the Duke of Mantua and Monferrato Guglielmo Gonzaga . He expanded the fortifications of Bergamo , Brescia , Legnago , Palmanova , Peschiera , Corfu and Zara .

In 1596 his book on fortification was published. Since he had around thirty years of professional experience at the time and started at the age of 22, he was born around 1545.

In his book he describes, among other things, breech-loading guns for ships and diving bells for work under water (foundation work and salvage work). This is one of the earliest mentions of a diving bell after a book by the lawyer, poet and musician Johann Taisnier (Jean Taisnier), which was published in Cologne in 1562. Images of leather diving suits with diving helmets and air supply via a float on the surface existed before. For simple machines he refers to Guidobaldo del Monte . The oldest description of a winch with a rack, for example for carters (wagon winch), comes from Lorini. He also describes a chain of buckets with a treadmill for earthworks and he is the first to describe a cable car, as well as dredging machines for the canals in Venice and rams for piles. According to Beck, he is also the inventor of double-acting circuits, or they are shown for the first time.

Lorini already articulates the self-confidence of a technician working with scientific methods by pointing out the difference between "speculative mathematics and a practical mechanic". This difference is based on the fact that “proofs and relationships derived from lines, surfaces and merely imagined, material-less bodies no longer apply precisely when they are applied to material objects, because the mathematician's mental ideas are not subject to those hindrances which are inherent in the material with which the mechanic works "

Fonts

• Le fortificationi di Buonaiuto Lorini nobile fiorentino, libri cinque, Venice 1596, archives, edition of 1609
  • German translation: Five books by Vestung bauwen, Frankfurt 1607, digitized

literature

• Theodor Beck : Contributions to the history of mechanical engineering , Springer, 2nd edition 1900
• Friedrich Klemm : Technology. A history of their problems , Orbis academicus Volume II / 5. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg / Munich 1954

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Klemm, Technik, 1954, p. 157