Science Art: From Les raisons des forces mouuantes, etc., 1615.

19 January 2026 grant Featured, Science Art 0

Scientific illustration of optical equipment studying light in the Early Modern period. Sunlight streams through a window and a board containing a series of lenses or apertures, focusing it on boxes and some sort of cutaway wall.
Light experiment,.
Scientific illustration of optical equipment studying light in the Early Modern period. Sunlight streams through a window and a board containing a series of lenses or apertures, focusing it on boxes and some sort of cutaway wall.

This is a light experiment from the 1600s, which I found in the British Library archive over yonder.

The book, Les raisons des forces &c was written by Salomon de Caus. You can find it on archive.org. I admit that I can’t read Early Modern French, but the book seems to be an examination of the science of fountains.

Yes… The Met says the book was “setting out the principles of hydraulics on which the automata or trick fountains and water jokes in the seventeenth-century garden were based.”

So this is horticultural mechanical engineering and hydrology.