China's Scientific Revolution
Among the engineering accomplishments of early China were matches, dry docks, the double-action piston pump, cast iron, the iron plough, the horse collar, the multi-tube seed drill, the wheelbarrow, the suspension bridge, the parachute, natural gas as fuel, the raised-relief map, the propeller, the sluice gate, and the pound lock. The Tang Dynasty (618 - 906 AD) in particular was a time of great innovation.
In the 7th century, book-printing was developed in China, Korea and Japan, using delicate hand-carved wooden blocks to print individual pages. The 9th century Diamond Sutra is the earliest known printed document. Movable type was also used in China for a time, but was abandoned because of the number of characters needed; it would not be until Johannes Gutenberg that the technique was reinvented in a suitable environment.
In addition to gunpowder, the Chinese also developed improved delivery systems for the Byzantine weapon of Greek fire, Meng Huo You and Pen Huo Qi first used in China c. 900. Chinese illustrations were more realistic than in Byzantine manuscripts, and detailed accounts from 1044 recommending its use on city walls and ramparts show the brass container as fitted with a horizontal pump, and a nozzle of small diameter. The records of a battle on the Yangtze near Nanjing in 975 offer an insight into the dangers of the weapon, as a change of wind direction blew the fire back onto the Song forces.
Read more about this topic: Science And Technology In China
Famous quotes containing the words china, scientific and/or revolution:
“The awakening of the people of China to the possibilities under free government is the most significant, if not the most momentous, event of our generation.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be ‘observed’ are manipulated to produce a new phenomena
[sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.”
—Ian Hacking (b. 1936)
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)