History
The earliest evidence for a connecting rod appears in the late 3rd century AD Roman Hierapolis sawmill. It also appears in two 6th century Eastern Roman saw mills excavated at Ephesus respectively Gerasa. The crank and connecting rod mechanism of these Roman watermills converted the rotary motion of the waterwheel into the linear movement of the saw blades.
Sometime between 1174 and 1206, the Arab inventor and engineer Al-Jazari described a machine which incorporated the connecting rod with a crankshaft to pump water as part of a water-raising machine, but the device was unnecessarily complex indicating that he still did not fully understand the concept of power conversion.
In Renaissance Italy, the earliest evidence of a − albeit mechanically misunderstood − compound crank and connecting-rod is found in the sketch books of Taccola. A sound understanding of the motion involved displays the painter Pisanello (d. 1455) who showed a piston-pump driven by a water-wheel and operated by two simple cranks and two connecting-rods.
By the 16th century, evidence of cranks and connecting rods in the technological treatises and artwork of Renaissance Europe becomes abundant; Agostino Ramelli's The Diverse and Artifactitious Machines of 1588 alone depicts eighteen examples, a number which rises in the Theatrum Machinarum Novum by Georg Andreas Böckler to 45 different machines.
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