Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages  

"It is, therefore, worth while to give a short list of some of the things the Greeks and Romans did not know, and that the Middle Ages did know. For most of the examples I shall cite I am indebted to Lynn White’s remarkable essay on Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages. The classical Greeks and Romans, although horsemen, had no stirrups. Neither did they think to shoe the hooves of their animals with plates of metal nailed to them. Until the ninth or tenth centuries of our era horses were so harnessed that they pushed against straps that ran high about their necks in such a way that if they threw their weight and strength into their work they strangled themselves. Neither did the classical peoples know how to harness draft animals in front of each other so that large teams could be used to pull great weights. Men were the only animals the ancients had that could pull efficiently. They did not even have wheelbarrows. They made little or no use of rotary motion and had no cranks by which to turn rotary and reciprocating motion into each other. They had no windmills. Such water wheels as they had came late and far between. The classical Greeks and Romans, unlike the Middle Ages, had no horse collars, no spectacles, no algebra, no gunpowder, no compass, no cast iron, no paper, no deep ploughs, no spinning wheels, no methods of distillation, no place value number systems—think of trying to extract a square root with either the Greek or the Roman system of numerals!"--Prints and Visual Communication (1953) by William Ivins, Jr., page 8