Middle Ages (5th-15th Century)

4,000 years of women in science! Did you know that? Women are, and always have been, scientists. This site lists over 125 names from our scientific and technical past. They are all women! This site grew out of the public talks given by Dr. Sethanne Howard, currently with the National Science Foundation. As we learn more, we add it to this page. We hope you will share what you know with us. This includes inventors, scholars and writers as well as mathematicians and astronomers. We hope you enjoy learning about some of these women.

Oral disease has been a problem for humans from the beginning of history. Skulls of Cro-Magnon peoples, who inhabited the earth 25,000 years ago, show evidence of tooth decay. The earliest recorded reference to oral disease is from an ancient (5000 BC) Sumerian text that describes "tooth worms" as a cause of dental decay. There is historical evidence that the Chinese used acupuncture around 2700 BC to treat pain associated with tooth decay.

Over 90 megabytes online of information on alchemy in all its facets. Divided into over 1300 sections and providing tens of thousands of pages of text, over 2000 images, over 200 complete alchemical texts, extensive bibliographical material on the printed books and manuscripts, numerous articles, introductory and general reference material on alchemy.

It will be the effort of the writer in the following pages to point out the peculiarities of material and construction involved in the designing and building of “Iron Highway Bridges,” in the hope that a dissemination of their scientific principles in a popular form, will bear fruit in a more thorough appreciation of a noble art, and in elevating the standard of requirements of this very important class of public works. The subject has been divided into two parts, each complete in itself; the one general and descriptive, and the other analytical. The former is peculiarly intended to present to public committees entrusted with the letting of bridge contracts such information as they ought to possess, while the latter is offered as an aid to engineers not experts in this branch of the profession, and yet who are often called upon to act as inspectors.

Begun in 1867 and completed in 1874, the Eads Bridge was named after its designer, James Buchanan Eads. It was the first bridge to span the Mississippi at St. Louis, the first bridge to make significant of steel, and one of the first bridges in the U.S. to make use of pneumatic caissons (the caissons sunk for the bridge are still among the deepest ever). It was also the first bridge to be built entirely using cantilever construction methods, avoiding the need for falsework, and the first bridge designed so that any part could be removed for repair or replacement. The bridge is now a National Historic Landmark.

Each of the original 33 leaves or folios (66 pages) are reproduced here in digital form for educational use only.
If your screen is set at 800 by 600 pixel resolution the large versions of the pages will appear close to the size of the originals which are approximately 240mm x160mm.
The pages follow the orientation and order in which they were bound together and here the usual convention is followed with each leaf or folio being numbered and the front recto and back verso identified with "r" and "v" respectively.

Villard de Honnecourt is known only through a portfolio of 33 parchment leaves containing approximately 250 drawings preserved in Paris (Bibl. nat. de France, MS. Fr. 19093). There is no record of him in any known contract, guild register, inscription, payment receipt, tax record, or any other type of evidence from which the names of medieval artisans are learnt. Villard's fame is due to the uniqueness of his drawings and 19th-century inventiveness in crediting him with having "erected churches throughout the length and breadth of Christendom" without any documentary evidence that he designed or built any church anywhere, or that he was in fact an architect.

Who Villard was, and what he did, must be postulated from his drawings and the textual addenda to them on 26 of the 66 surfaces of the 33 leaves remaining in his portfolio. In these sometimes enigmatic inscriptions Villard gave his name twice (Wilars dehonecort [fol. 1v]; Vilars dehoncort [fol. 15r]), but said nothing of his occupation and claimed not a single artistic creation or monument of any type. He addressed his portfolio, which he termed a "book," to no one in particular, saying (fol. 1v) that it contained "sound advice on the techniques of masonry and on the devices of carpentry . . . and the techniques of representation, its features as the discipline of geometry commands and instructs it."

Bridging rivers, gorges, narrows, straits, and valleys always has played an important role in the history of human settlement. Since ancient times, bridges have been the most visible testimony of the noble craft of engineers. A bridge can be defined in many ways, but Andrea Palladio, the great 16th century Italian architect and engineer, hit on the essence of bridge building when he said "...bridges should befit the spirit of the community by exhibiting commodiousness, firmness, and delight." In more practical terms, he went on to explain that the way to avoid having the bridge carried away by the violence of water was to make the bridge without fixing any posts in the water. Since the beginning of time, the goal of bridge builders has been to create as wide a span as possible which is commodious, firm, and occasionally delightful. Spanning greater distances is a distinct measure of engineering prowess.

The VL is the oldest catalog of the web, started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of html and the web itself. Unlike commercial catalogs, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert; even though it isn't the biggest index of the web, the VL pages are widely recognised as being amongst the highest-quality guides to particular sections of the web.