THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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stage. Miniatures based on the medieval legend of Alexander already portray a kind of submarine, in which Alexander sinks into the depths and observes their
monsters; but the age was only interested in these ocean depths, not in the glass submarine. Roger Bacon, the empirical and scientific Franciscan, represents a solitary
exception in the thirteenth century. In his ‘Epistola de secretis operibus artis’ he prophesied carriages which are moved without the aid of animals, ‘with incredible
speed’, and also flying machines, ‘in which a man who sits comfortably and thinks about everything beats the air in the manner of the birds’. But Roger Bacon, with
these inventive dreams, met with no interest in a society which was just as class­bound and static as it was full of mistrust towards nature. Thus only in the Renaissance,
only with the business interest and pursuit of profit of the capitalism which was getting under way at that time, was the technological imagination publicly acknowledged
and promoted. The Renaissance and Baroque are both the age of technological wind­makers à la Dr Orfyréus, whom we have encountered above, and above all of
practical and capable designers. They were dilettantes tinkering around in many areas, experimenting around in all areas, without sufficient mechanical knowledge, but
overflowing with patentable ideas. At their head stood Joachim Becher (1635–1682), a splendid figure whom Sombart rescued from obscurity (cf. ‘Die Technik im
Zeitalter des Frühkapitalismus’, Archiv for Sozialwissenschaft, Vol. 34, p. 721ff.), a lucky Sunday's child of inventiveness: Becher brought blueprints into the world by
the dozen, new looms, water­wheels, clockwork mechanisms, a thermoscope, a method of extracting tar from hard coal, and so on. His book ‘Foolish Wisdom and
wise Folly or a Hundred at once Political and physical/mechanical and mercantilic Concepta and Propositiones’, 1686, really raves in the realm of unlimited
possibilities, unimpeded by mathematical and mechanical knowledge of the facts. This strange connection between dilettantism and technology, incidentally, lasted from
the Renaissance until far into the eighteenth century. A doctor, a student of theology, an Egyptologist, and a young worker invented asphalt, the knitting machine, the
magic lantern, and the steering mechanism of the steam­engine at that time, while the great natural scientists, like Kepler, Newton, and even Galileo, were interested in
technology more as a side­line and only two scientists: Guericke, as the inventor of the air pump,* and Huygens, as the inventor of the pendulum clock, figure equally
strongly in the history of physics and technology. The capitalist mandate was the same for technology and science, but for a long
* Otto von Guericke (1602–86). His air­pump, invented in 1654, preceded Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke's version, the ‘Machina Boyliana’ (c. 1658).