The Beginnings of the Mastery of Nature. 1. Early Forms of Mechanics

Weule, Karl, 1864-1926Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.1

Word count: 180K words
Chapters: 19

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Die Anfänge der Naturbeherrschung. 1. Frühformen der Mechanik by Karl WeuleAuthor: Weule, Karl, 1864-1926,Language: German, Class: GN: Geography, Anthropology, Recreation: Anthropology, Release Date: Nov 5, 2017

Editor's review

This is the first volume of German ethnologist Karl Weule's work on how humans began to master nature, focusing on the early forms of mechanics. Starting from ethnographic and anthropological questions, the author examines early human practice in tools, levers, transport, and simple machines, arguing that technology was not suddenly invented but accumulated and took shape gradually through everyday labor. Its value lies in understanding the history of technology within ethnographic material and concrete scenes of life; the language is German, and the argument bears the style and limitations of a discipline in its early twentieth-century infancy. For today's readers of technology history, anthropology, and history of science, it is both a source of ideas and a specimen of disciplinary history. Best read in sections with questions in mind, distinguishing contemporary speculation from later empirical conclusions.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers interested in the history of technology and early tool research
Students of ethnology and anthropology who need early sources
Researchers who read German and care about disciplinary history
General readers curious about how humans gradually mastered simple machines

Not a good fit for

Readers with no German who do not wish to use tools
Those expecting the latest archaeological evidence and theoretical reviews
Readers who want light stories rather than academic argument

Reading tips

Read the introduction and conclusion first to grasp the author's questions and argumentative framework, then move to specific chapters.
Jot down the tools and machine types mentioned as you read to build your own comparison list.
Compare the book's judgments with newer general works on technology history and archaeology, marking doubtful or superseded points.
If German is difficult, read topic sentences of paragraphs first to follow the argument, then examine the examples in detail.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

What level of German does this book require?

The original is academic German with long sentences and many technical terms, of medium-to-high difficulty. Readers with a university-level reading knowledge of German, or who can work through it section by section with a dictionary or translation tools, will be better suited; without any German, the reading cost will be high.

Do the book's views still hold today?

They should not be taken as settled conclusions. Written in the discipline's early period, the material and inferences were limited by the conditions of the time, and some guesses have been corrected by later archaeological discoveries and anthropological research. Read it as a document of disciplinary history and use it alongside newer research.

Will reading only the first volume be incomplete?

The title identifies it as the first part, and the theme is limited to early forms of mechanics, with a relatively focused scope. Reading it alone can convey the author's basic approach to this question, but for the overall theory one should still consult later parts or other related works.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Weule, Karl, 1864-1926 Author

Karl Weule (1864–1926) was a German ethnologist and geographer, though publicly available information on his life and academic career is limited. Only one of his works is held in the collection: Die Anfänge der Naturbeherrschung. 1. Frühformen der Mechanik, which may be rendered as The Beginnings of the Mastery of Nature: Early Forms of Mechanics. The book shows his interest in how early humans came to understand and make use of natural laws, especially the embryonic forms of mechanical knowledge, and it reflects a perspective that crosses ethnology with the early history of technology. By examining the origins of technology within the development of human culture, the work reflects the concern of German-speaking scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with primitive technology and the evolution of knowledge, and it offers a reference point for later discussion in the history of technology and ethnology. Given the limited sources, a fuller picture of his scholarship remains to be verified.