THE EVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING THROUGH LARGE CULTURAL AREAS

Mechanical Engineering is probably the forerunner of many branches of Engi-neering and has persistently been their companion up to the present. For this rea-son, the History of Machines embraces a very broad period of the History of Man-kind, and can be studied from many perspectives. This paper attempts to link progress in Mechanical Engineering to the great cultures that have arisen through-out the History of Mankind. This paper begins with the anonymous mechanical developments that appeared in Prehistory and opened up the way to the first civilisations, marked to a large ex-tent, maybe, by Greco-Roman culture in Europe and by China in Asia. After them came the Islamic world, which, in the Middle Ages stimulated society to find new mechanical devices and set the foundations that would lead to the Renaissance. Outstanding in this period was the expansion of Italian, French and German crea-tive and innovative thinking with its “Treatises on Machines”, which, for a short time, coincided with the advance of the Iberian Empire and the development of machinery for the New World. Finally, the Industrial Revolution became the cli-max of all previous developments and a period of rapid mechanical evolution be-gan that was to be highly interesting from a historical and technological point of view. This was accompanied by a parallel interest in reflecting on and analysing machines, which has led to the appearance of countless “Treatises on Machines”