{"id":639,"date":"2009-07-16T13:46:26","date_gmt":"2009-07-16T13:46:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/notechmagazine.com\/2009\/07\/guido-vigevanos-wind-car-1335.html"},"modified":"2015-10-16T12:18:23","modified_gmt":"2015-10-16T10:18:23","slug":"guido-vigevanos-wind-car-1335","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/2009\/07\/guido-vigevanos-wind-car-1335.html","title":{"rendered":"Guido Vigevano’s Wind Car (1335)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Guido<\/a><\/p>\n

“Chapter XII. On the way of making a second waggon which is propelled by the wind without draught animals, and which dashes violently over open country to the confusion of all troops”<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Quoted from “Texaurus regis Francie<\/a>” by Guido von Vigevano (1331) – see these two<\/a> texts<\/a> (translated to English).<\/p>\n

The illustration shows a digital replica of Guido Vigevano’s 8 metre long wind-propelled battle wagon, made by historian Ulrich Alertz<\/a> (he has more drawings). For his replica, Alertz built upon both the texts and the original plans<\/a> (which are hard to interpret because of the absence of perspective). He concludes that with better gearings and with the insertion of a steering mechanism the wind car would indeed have been able to speed over flat and smooth terrain – in strong winds.<\/p>\n

Guido Vigevano’s wind-propelled battle wagon was designed as a weapon in the crusades. But the wind conditions and the scarcity of flat and smooth terrain made it so that the car was never built (although the inventor probably constructed a scale model). It is remarkable that Vigevano imagined a wind car powered by a vertical windmill (hot and sophisticated technology in those days), rather than using a low-tech sail (which the Chinese had done centuries before).<\/p>\n

Sources: 1<\/a> & 2<\/a>, both in German. There is a short Wikipedia entry on Guido Vigevano<\/a> in English. More “machine books” at the database machine drawings<\/a>. Related: more low-tech cars<\/a> \/ floating citadels, powered by wind and water mills<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Chapter XII. On the way of making a second waggon which is propelled by the wind without draught animals, and which dashes violently over open country to the confusion of all troops”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[256,53,215,315,8,6,135,136,102,228,132],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2805,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639\/revisions\/2805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}