Fausto Veranzio

212
Fausto Veranzio bigraphy, stories - Italian humanist and bishop

Fausto Veranzio : biography

1551 – 1617

Fausto VeranzioAlfred Day Rathbone, , R.M. McBride & Company, 1943, University of California. page 172 or Faust VrančićOriginally pronounced "vranchich" ( Hungarian and Vernacular Latin: Verancsics Faustus)Andrew L. Simon, László Sipka: Innovators and Innovations (circa 1551 – January 17, 1617)According to he died on January 20, 1617. was a polymath and bishop from the Venetian Republic.Berthold Laufer, Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, University of Michigan, 1928

Life

Family history

One of the illustrations in Machinae Novae is a sketch of a parachute dubbed Homo Volans ("The Flying Man"). Having examined Leonardo da Vinci’s rough sketches of a parachute, Veranzio designed a parachute of his own., by Lynn White, Jr. in: Technology and Culture, Vol. 9, No. 3. (1968), pp. 462-467 (463)Jonathan Bousfield, , pg. 280, Rough Guides (2003), ISBN 1-84353-084-8 Paolo Guidotti (about 1590) already attempted to carry out Da Vinci’s theories, ending by falling on a house roof and breaking his thigh bone; but while Francis Godwin was writing his flying romance The Man in the Moone", Fausto Veranzio is widely believed to have performed a parachute jumping experiment for real Francis Trevelyan Miller, , G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930, pages 101-106 and, therefore, to be the first man to build and test a parachute: according to the story passed on, Veranzio, in 1617, now over sixty-five years old, implemented his design and tested the parachute by jumping from St Mark’s Campanile in Venice., Alfred Day Rathbone, R.M. McBride & Company, 1943, University of California. It is generally added that this event were documented some 30 years later in a book Mathematical Magick or, the Wonders that may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry (London, 1648) written by John Wilkins, the secretary of the Royal Society in London.

However, John Wilkins, in his Mathematical Magick, wrote about flying and about his persuasion that flying will be possible. Persons jumping from high towers and methods slowing down their fall were not his concern. His treatise does not even mention the name of Fausto Veranzio nor does it document any jump by parachute or any event at all in 1617.

Furthermore, the story about Veranzio’s jump does not explain what might have motivated a former chancellor to the Holy Roman Emperor and diplomat, at the age of 65 and only a few days before his death, to jump from the Campanile. The story neither explains how anybody might have achieved to get the wooden frame out of the tower into a horizontal position and at the same time himself under the parachute without the applicance tilting and collapsing.

The story about Fausto Veranzio testing his parachute thus appears to be an early urban legend. No evidence has ever been found that anybody ever tested Veranzio’s parachute.

Mills

His areas of interest in engineering and mechanics were broad. Mills were one of his main point of research, where he created 18 different designs. He envisioned windmills with both vertical and horizontal axes, with different wing constructions to improve their efficiency. The idea of a mill powered by tides incorporated accumulation pools filled with water by the high tide and emptied when the tide ebbed, simply using gravity; the concept has just recently been engineered and used.

Urbanist and engineer in Rome and Venice

By order of the Pope, he spent two years in Rome where he envisioned and made projects needed for regulating rivers, since Rome was often flooded by the Tiber river. He also tackled the problem of the wells and water supply of Venice, which is surrounded by sea., Vol 53, New York Public Library, 1829 Devices to register the time using water, fire, or other methods were envisioned and materialized. His own sun clock was effective in reading the time, date, and month, but functioned only in the middle of the day.

The construction method of building metal bridges and the mechanics of the forces in the area of statics were also part of his research. He drew proposals which predated the actual construction of modern suspension bridges and cable-stayed bridges by over two centuries. The last area was described when further developed in a separate book by mathematician Simon de Bruges (Simon Stevin) in 1586.