Chapter Eight: Guidobaldo dal Monte and Hero’s Machines

In his Mechanicorum liber of 1577, Guidobaldo dal Monte took up from Pappus Hero’s program of the five simple machines and adopted the mechanical challenge as the purpose of his mechanics. After devastating criticism of Tartaglia and the science of weights, he applied Archimedes’ principles of equilibrium and centres of gravity to Hero’s machines by establishing their conditions of equilibrium. But without Hero’s principle of less force, he could give no definite rule for the relation between moving forces and loads. Nevertheless, his was the first comprehensive work on mechanics as the theory of machines.