Pile Drivers Article

RESISTANCE TO TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION: THE HISTORY OF THE PILE DRIVER THROUGH THE 18TH CENTURY

MARJORIE NICE BOYER

Writing a history of the pile driver, we are hampered by the lack of interest displayed in the subject by our predecessors. Only in the 14th century A.D. do we find substantial evidence about the operation of that device, and only in the 15th do we begin to see pictures of pile drivers. Even then, most of the sketches were imaginative, drawn to promote this or that improved pile driver; these machines seem to have encountered a resistance that prevented their adoption. It is the purpose of this paper to determine what pile drivers were actually in use in Europe, especially France and the Netherlands, between the 14th and 18th centuries and to propose an explanation for the clear preference by builders for the simpler rather than the more mechanically sophisticated versions.

The scarcity of source materials for the history of the pile driver is illustrated in a quick survey. The beginnings are obscure; the pile driver was far too humble to appear in the royal annals of Assyrian conquests or in the Greek epics. Yet archaeology tells us that there were piles under houses built by the Lake Dwellers in prehistoric times. One might suppose that the Greeks would have described the pile driver in their treatises on machines, or the Romans in their discussions of construction, but no. Vitruvius does indeed recommend driving piles under temple foundations in marshy areas,' but he does not explain how to do this. It was not worth his while to discuss common machines,

DR. BOYER is professor emerita at York College of the City University of New York. A version of this paper was read before the Committee for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Brooklyn College on October 27, 1983. For criticisms and suggestions, the author is indebted to T. H. Boyer, Norman A. F. Smith, Bert S. Hall, Thomas B. Settle, and Gustina Scaglia.

'Vitruvius, De Architectura, ed. from Harleian manuscript 2767, trans. Frank Granger (London and New York, 1931), 3.4.2.

an attitude illustrated in the following remark: "Besides, there are innumerable mechanical devices about which it does not seem useful to enlarge because they are to hand in our daily use."2

During much of the Middle Ages the situation with regard to the history of the pile driver was not much better than in antiquity: refer ences are mostly incidental and uninstructive. About 1200 Alexander Neckham does mention pile drivers, but only as follows: "Now the solidity of the foundation is tested [exploratur] with piles driven into the bowels of the earth."' Villard de Honnecourt in the 13th century gives a sketchy drawing of a machine for sawing off the tops of piles under water, but we are supposed to know how to get them there before cutting them off.• There are brief references to pile drivers in chronicles and more information in accounts. Pile drivers are mentioned in 1238 at the cloister of Bloemkamp in the Netherlands; in 1289, 1329, 1330, and later in the accounts of London Bridge and the Tower of London; at Rochester beginning in the late 14th century; at Poitiers in 1386; at Albi in 1408-10; and at Lyons in 1416 and later.5 Finally, in the years 1387-89 we find copious information on pile drivers in the accounts of the Orleans bridge, enabling us to determine the details of their construction and use.6

If written information on the early history of the pile driver is scarce, the situation as regards pictorial evidence is even worse. The earliest pile driver illustrating a literary text is in a 1519 manuscript of Caesar's Gallic Wars, where the Roman commander is shown supervising the building of the bridge across the Rhine.⁷ The lack of interest on the part of early illustrators does not mean they were averse to depicting construction techniques as such. From the 13th century on, many are the pictures of the founder inspecting the building of a church or the

2lbid., I 0.1.

3L. F. Salzman, Building in England down to 1540: A Documentary History (Oxford, 1952),

pp. 87-88.

'Theodore Bowie, ed., The Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt (Bloomington, Ind., and London, 1959), plate 60.

5For Bloemkamp, see Franz Maria Feldhaus, Die Maschinen im Leben der Volker (Basel and Stuttgart, 1954), pp. 197-98; Atlas de l'ordre cistercien, s.v."Bloemkamp, Netherlands, province of Frisia, commune Wouserdael, diocese Utrecht." For London, see Salzman,

pp. 88, 328. For Rochester, see Salzman, p. 86. For Poitiers, Archives municipales de Poitiers, Cahier 25.J 7, 9, 14. For Albi, Archivescommunalesd'Albi CC 168, fol. 72r. For Lyons, see Marie Claude Guigue, ed., Registres consulaires de la ville de Lyon ou Recueil des

deliberations du conseil de la commune de 1416 a 1423 (Lyon, 1882), pp. 7, 288-89.

6Archives departementales du Loiret CC 920; Marjorie Boyer, "A Fourteenth Century Pile Driver: The Engin of the Bridge at Orleans," History of Technology, vol. 9 (1984).

'Marjorie Boyer, Medieval French Bridges: A History (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), fig. I.

construction of the Tower of Babel. These illustrations frequently show hoists but not pile drivers. Perhaps one reason is simply that in real life pile drivers were comparatively rare. They were used only during construction in marshy areas or during building in water, as of bridges, jetties, or piers. The former situation is one that builders preferred to avoid when they could, and the latter does not occur in the texts usually illustrated by artists.

By the 15th century, the problem of driving piles effectively had caught the attention of engineers, including those preoccupied with building military machines. Drawings in technical treatises include those of the Anonymous of the Hussite Wars, Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch, and the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.8 In the 16th century there were more of these elaborate pile drivers, some of them with several windlasses and numerous pulleys, designed to secure mechanical advantages and to save manpower. Designs were proposed in which the ram, reaching a certain height, dropped of its own weight, or in which a catch automatically released the ram at the desired height, and the ram was automatically rebooked after hitting the pile. Such a pile driver, sketched by an anonymous artist, is shown in figure 1.

The technological sophistication of the improved pile drivers provokes our admiration, but there is little evidence that contemporaries shared our attitude. They continued to employ the medieval pile drivers with a blatant disregard for what 19th-century historians were fond of calling progress. Historians of technology well know that the invention of a mechanically superior device does not ensure its adoption. Indeed, the construction practices of 14th- and 15th-century France were still being followed in the 18th century, as I have shown elsewhere in the case of bridge building.'' The present inquiry demonstrates that this conservatism was equally true with regard to the pile driver. Those employed in the 17th and 18th centuries were still essentially the simple ones of the 14th and 15th, as shown in the construction manuals of Cornelis Meijer (1696), of Hubert Gautier (1716), and of Jean Rodolphe Perronet (1782-83).10

8Bert S. Hall, The Technologicallllustrations of the So-called "Anonymous of the Hussite Wars" in Codex Latinus Monacensis (Wiesbaden, 1979), fol. 8v, 37v,; Helmut and Willy Storck, eds., Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch nach dem originale des Fursten von Walburg-Wolfegg Waldsee im Auftrage des Deutschen Vereins fur Kunstwissenschaft (Leipzig, 1912), Tafel 44; fl codico atlantico di Leonardo da Vinci nella Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano, reprodotte e pubblicato della Regia accademia <lei Lincei (Milan, 1894), fol. 289r; Feldhaus (n. 5 above), pp. 238, 239.

⁹Boyer, Medieval French Bridges, p. 144.

'°Cornelis Meijer, Trait/! des moyens de rendre les rivii!res navigable, avec plusieurs desseins de jetee (Amsterdam, 1696); Hubert Gautier, Traite des ponts (4th ed., Paris, 1765); and Jean Rodophe Perronet, Description des projets de la construction des ponts de Neuilly, de Mante, d'Orleans et autres, 2 vols. (Paris, 1782-83).

The pile drivers demonstrably in use from the 15th through the 18th centuries were the hand ram, the hye, and the engin. Each of the last two types had what contemporary documents call a tower and modern oilmen a rig. From the top hung a pulley over which ran a rope with the ram on one end, but the hye had a windlass on the other end, while the engin was powered directly by a crew of men pulling on individual cords running into the great rope. The meaning of hye is unambig uous: whether in the 14th, 15th, or 18th century, it always indicates a pile driver with a winch (windlass). Engin, on the other hand, was a comprehensive term. In 14th- and 15th-century France there were

·-·....:-.....:...... .. --·--· -

Fie. I .-In this design, the ram is automatically released at the desired height and rehooked upon striking the pile. MS Lat. 2941, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, fol. 44r. The artist is unknown, but this is mainly a copy from Taccola's De Machinis. (Photo courtesy of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana and Columbia University.)

engins de guerre, engins to raise the portcullis, and engins to drive piles. Each of these machines had a pulley and a rope-although frequently not much else in common. Yet at this time, in the case of pile drivers, engin seems always to have meant the simple pile driver with men pulling on the rope.11 Later there seems to have been no single word indicating the pile driver without the winch. For the sake of convenience in the present discussion, the word engin has been used to designate the simple pile driver in which the ram was raised by man power, the one without the winch.

The hand ram was the least used of the three types of pile driver. No documents known to me attest its use, but it appears in three pictures, one a view of a city, one a construction scene, and one a builder's manual. The hand ram occurs in the Catena view of the city of Florence ca. 1470 (fig. 2). The irony in this picture of Florence is striking. It was in 15th-century Italy that engineers proposed some of the most elegant solutions to the problem of driving piles. Yet at Florence in the Catena view the builders are using a hand ram which could equally well have been employed by the prehistoric Lake Dwellers. The apparatus is of the simplest. It consists in four uprights fastened together by timbers to form a rectangle supporting two boards on which stand two men facing each other, one on either side of the pile to be driven. The workers are lifting a length of tree trunk and dropping it on the pile.

It seems worthwhile to emphasize that, from the technological point of view, the mode of pile driving in the Catena picture could have been employed by men a few thousand years earlier. Here may indeed be the solution to a problem which has long plagued historians of technol ogy: how the Lake Dwellers put the piles under their houses. It has been conjectured that prehistoric men used gigantic hammers. That there was such a technique, even in the 17th century, is shown by Cornelis Meijer (fig. 3, 1). Yet Meijer considers the usefulness of such a mallet very limited, applicable only to cases in which the soil is very light and little force is required to make the piles enter the ground.12 Feldhaus rejected the suggestion of mighty hammers as unreasonable.13 It is much more likely that the Lake Dwellers used a hand ram.

The hand ram was still being employed in the 17th century. Meijer recommends it in cases in which the ground is very difficult to pene-

¹¹At Orleans in the bridge accounts the engin is always the pile driver with 14 to 16 men pulling on the ram. Archives du Loiret CC 920, fol. 20v. "L'engin a batre Jes pelz aux orgaux du dit pont" [i.e., The engin to drive the piles at the starlings of the said bridge].

¹²Meijer, pp. 13-14.

"Franz Maria Feldhaus, Technik des Antike und des Mittelalters (Potsdam, I 931), p. 19.

F1G, 2,-Hand raminoperation, as shown in the Catena view of Florence, ca, 1470, (From Attilo Mori and G, Boffito, Piante e Vercute di Firenze studio storico, topowafico, cartowafico [Florence, 1926].)

FIG. 3.-At upper right a pile is being driven with a large mallet, at upper left with a hand ram; below are examples of the engin and hye with running rams. The center hye has both a windlass and a catch release. (From Cornelis Meijer, Traite des moyens de rendre Les rivieres navigables avec plu.sieurs desseins de Jettie [Amsterdam, 1696), pl. 3, p. I 8.)

trate and the piles longer and thicker than those appropriate for a mallet. His hand ram is more technically sophisticated than the Florentine one. He describes it as a heavier and larger mallet, pierced vertically by an iron rod, one end of which is fixed in the pile to be driven. The ram is provided with protruding horizontal handles, and on either side a man stands on a platform to raise the weight and allow it to fall along the iron rod (fig. 3, 2). Meijer's hand ram seems to suggest imagination rather than utility, and it immediately raises doubts that it was used in just that form.

There is another picture of a hand ram in use a little later than Meijer's, that is, ca. 1700.14 The operation is on the same technological level as that in the Catena view of Florence more than 200 years earlier, but here the two men lifting the hand ram are working in the Nether lands. They occupy a spot in the upper right-hand corner of a picture showing the building of a shipping lock. Most of the illustration is taken up by two engins, each in its own boat, the two boats being fastened together by boards. Such a machine must have been unwieldly. Perhaps, if the work involved were a minor matter, it was more convenient to use a hand ram than to maneuver two engins into place. The hand ram was certainly cheaper in terms of manpower, for each engin required up to thirty men to pull on the ram.

The most popular of the three types of pile driver was the engin. Engins can be subdivided according to whether the ram was a free falling or a running ram. A free-falling ram is shown in the Anonymous of the Hussite Wars on folio 37 verso, where it is suspended from the point where the uprights meet. This was not the only type of free falling ram; there was also the gibbet ram in which the driving head was suspended from a beam perpendicular to a solitary upright, an arrangement especially suited to pile driving from a boat, as was the case at Orleans. This was the type shown in the above-mentioned French manuscript of Caesar's Gallic Wars. In contradistinction to the gibbet ram was the running ram, which moved up and down between or along uprights.15 (See fig. 3, 3, 4, 5.) Whether the engins mentioned in the 14th and 15th centuries were running rams is frequently un clear. However, later writers of construction manuals-Meijer, Gautier, and Perronet-do not even consider the free-falling ram. They prefer the running ram to all others, and they assume it will be provided with a release catch.

"Johann van Veen, Dredge, Drain, Reclaim: The Art of a Nation (5th ed., The Hague, 1962), p. 66.

'"'Salzman (n. 3 above), p. 328. Medieval London accounts refer to the gibbet ram (the

small one) and the running ram (the great one).

In the 14th and 15th centuries, almost all mentions of pile drivers specify the engin. However, the hye (the pile driver with the windlass) was em ployed in 1413 at the ceremonial opening of construction of the timber bridge, the Pont-Notre-Dame at Paris,16 and there was an hye briefly in use at the bridge at Orleans in 1389. There the pile driver with the windlass was used only twice, once in March for one day and once in July for two.17 During those four months the builder, a wheel wright, was able to reduce the number of men needed for operation from six to two, but that is the last we hear of the hye at Orleans. The Orleanais continued to employ the engin, but not the hye, at least into the 16th century. Authors of the 17th and 18th centuries describe the hye as equipped with both a windlass and a catch with a rope for releasing the ram.18 (See fig. 3, 5.)

The resistance to the adoption of the hye is the more striking because of the proliferation in the 16th and early 17th centuries of drawings of pile drivers with numerous features to produce mechanical advantages and save labor. In this period, for example, two inventors-the Italian engineer Buonaiuto Lorini and the Amsterdam carpenter Lamprecht Gerritsz-advocated the adoption of their improved pile drivers on the grounds that they spared expense, conserved manpower, and were easier on the men who did the work. Lorini states that the old pile drivers required twenty-five to thirty men who quickly became tired, whereas his needed only three, two to turn the crank and one to manage the two ropes controlling the direction of the ram.19 The chief features of Lorini's machine were two pulleys, a rope for each, an unusually long windlass crank whose parts he calls levers, and a flywheel (presumably to make the process of winding the rope smoother). Despite the drawing and the text, many points about opera tion remain obscure. To build such a pile driver might have been extraordinarily difficult, especially since the only dimension given was the diameter of the flywheel.

If one suspects that Lorini was more interested in dazzling the

reader with ingenuity than in providing him with useful information, an attempt to construct a pile driver from the description furnished by Gerritsz can only be called hopeless. The details on his pile driver constituted the bare minimum necessary to obtain a ten-year patent in 1595 from the States General of the Low Countries without letting his

¹⁶A. Tuetey, ed.,journaL d'un bourgeois de Paris (Paris, 1881), pp. 30-31.

¹⁷Archives du Loiret CC 920, fol. 30r and 32v.

¹⁸Meijer illustrates the catch. See also Gautier (n. 10 above), p. 159.

¹⁹Buonaiuto Lorini, Le fortificatione di Buonaiuto Lorini corrette & ampLiate di tuttoquello che mancaua per Lor compita perfettione con L'aggiunta deL sesto Libre (Venice, 1609), pp. 233-34. See also Frieda van Tyghem, Op en om de MiddeLeeuse Bouwwerf de Gereedeschappen en Toestellen Gebruikt bij het bouwen van de Vroege MiddeLeeuwen tot omstreeks 1600. Studie Gesteund op beeLende, gescheven archaeoLogische Bronnen (Brussels, 1966), p. 240.

competitors know anything useful. Gerritsz claims that his advanced pile driver needed only six or seven men rather than twenty-eight to thirty for operation. He says that after each volley of twenty to twenty two blows with the old type, the men needed a rest pause, six or seven being required during the driving of each pile.²⁰ Because Gerritsz's pile driver was not as fatiguing, it eliminated the need for rest pauses. Rest pauses, however, persisted. In the 18th century Perronet mentions them,2' and Gerritsz's machine does not seem to have come into general use. A hundred years later, ca. 1700, pile drivers in the Nether lands were using some thirty workers. Nor does Gerritsz's claim of superior speed for a pile driver with mechanical advantages seem to have been admitted by others. Later writers on construction techniques consider the hye to be slower than the pile driver without the winch.²² The two claims to superiority of the hye rested on its facility in delivering heavier blows to drive larger piles and on its saving of manpower compared with the pile driver where men pulled on the ram. Yet a series of lighter blows seems to be more efficient in driving piles than fewer, heavier blows. In medieval Orleans, where a great deal of information on pile driving exists, there rarely were large piles, and probably the Orleanais preferred a larger number of men. There the pile-driving season coincided with the period of low water which forced boatmen into unemployment. During their slack season a num

ber of them worked on the bridge at Orleans.

* * *

The whole question of the lack of adoption of sophisticated machines has to do with the separation, reaching all the way back to antiquity, of the learned and the artisan traditions. The well-known dichotomy between the theoretician and the practitioner, the architect and the laborer, persisted throughout the Middle Ages, as learned treatises were written and artisan traditions developed in two discrete streams with little intercommunication. Theoreticians did not expect to know the exact details of construction, and workmen expected neither to learn from treatises nor to write down what they knew. Hence the cursory nature of the sketches of Villard de Honnecourt, which we today find so uninformative. This attitude toward theory and practice was displayed in 1437 by a notary drawing up a contract for the rebuilding of two piers and adjoining arches of the bridge at

'"G. Doorman, Octrooien voor uitwindigen in de Neder/anden (de J 6e de tot 18de eeuw) (The Hague, 1940), p. 93, 1-9-1595. fol. 119, G 21. A patent for a pile driver using only four men was granted in 1636, and it was equally brief in its description, 3-9-1636. fol. 85, G 378.

21Perronet (n. 10 above), 1:97.

22Meijer, p. 17.

Orleans. His only real concern is to make sure the piers are built in such a manner as to provide foundations for the houses to be constructed on the bridge in order to bring in rent to maintain the structure. After specifying many details, he turns the matter over to the workmen: "As those who do the job will see, while working on it, what has to be done to support the beams for the buildings which will be made in time to come."23 Somewhat the same sentiment is expressed about the same time by Taccola in his De Machinis: "Not everything can be said clearly, but persons who know their work will see in the drawing what needs to be done."2• In the early 18th century, Hubert Gautier still accepts the dichotomy between the theoretical and the practical. His recommendation to the architect requiring scaffolds is to take the advice of carpenters who know how to make them.25

The dichotomy between theoreticians and practitioners of technology tended to leave craftsmen without access to the newest ideas and inventions. In medieval France there was not much consultation among experts in construction except over relatively short distances, and in bridge building experienced men were reluctant to undertake a job far from their base. Ideas do not seem to have spread widely, and bridges were built by local residents.26 Pile drivers were built by men on the spot. Such artisans commonly had neither the training nor the incentive to learn more about complicated machines. The Orleans wheelwright who abandoned the attempt to produce an hye was obviously having mechanical problems and may have become convinced that it was hopeless to attempt to make a machine capable of competing with the engin. The level of technical education prevalent in the Middle Ages seems to have lasted into the 18th century and militated against the adoption of the elaborate pile drivers of a Lorini or a Taccola or a Leonardo da Vinci. To construct these required a theoret ical education not available to the usual builder. Hubert Gautier, in his treatise on bridges, explains that in I715 he sent to the Journal des savants five questions concerning bridge construction to be resolved. The mathematician La Hire sent in an answer, but Gautier was much disappointed. La Hire's response was useless: he had used algebra,

²³Archives du Loiret III al fol. 130v. Published in my "Moving Ahead with the Fifteenth Century: New Ideas in Bridge Construction at Orleans,"' History of Technolo{!;Y 6 (1981): 18-19.

21Mariano dijacopo, called II Taccola, De Machinis, ed., annotated, and trans. Gustina Scaglia (Wiesbaden, 1971), p. I 03.

';Gautier (n. 10 above), p. 72.

²⁶See my "Moving Ahead with the Fifteenth Century" (n. 23 above), pp. 12-13, and my "Working at the Bridge Site in Late Medieval France," forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Colloque, Artistes, Artisans et Production Artistique au Mayen-Age, Universite de Haute-Bretagne, Rennes II, May 2-6, 1983.

something no builder knew.27 If the obverse of the coin was that craftsmen had an inferior technical education, the reverse was that the machines kept breaking down. Even the simple pile driver powered by men pulling directly on the ram needed frequent repairs during the two-month pile-driving season at Orleans in 1387-89. How much more exasperating must have been the case of the complicated pile drivers!

Finally, in considering the reluctance to adopt innovative designs in pile drivers, one must take into account the question of the relative reliability of machines, the constraints their use imposes on operators, and the availability of a large supply of inexpensive manpower. No hint of a labor shortage is contained in the accounts of the bridge and hospital of Orleans for 1387-89, and in the 18th century Gautier tells us that men are never lacking at a construction site. Perronet had the services of two regiments of soldiers in building the new bridge at Orleans. Gautier's and Perronet's fundings came from the French government, and it is not surprising that they were unmoved by considerations of cost which had seemed so important to Lamprecht Gerritsz in Amsterdam in 1595.

Gautier, although head of the Ponts et Chaussees under Louis XV, distrusted machines. On the subject of cofferdams he mentions a number of contrivances to exhaust water-Archimedes' screws, water wheels, pumps, and other machines--but he complains that some of them do not raise water high enough without incredible difficulties; that waterwheels take up too much space; and that, anyway, machines break down. For draining water from a cofferdam, he writes: "I do not find anything more natural than the arms of men with a tub [baquet] with two handles, who without interruption day and night ceaselessly dip out the water at different heights."28 If the men changed off every hour or two, there were no problems of fatigue, and if anyone should become indisposed, there was always someone to replace him. In Gautier's view, men were so much more reliable and satisfactory than machines!

It is obvious that, in France and the Netherlands, from the 14th to

the 18th century, people preferred the simple pile driver in which men raised the ram by pulling on a rope to the more sophisticated pile driver with the windlass. They did so for a variety of reasons. Probably there was a preference for tradition, an unwillingness to adjust to new ideas and to learn and observe the rules for operating unfamiliar machines. These very human reactions are still with us and account in

27Gautier, p. 21.

²⁸lbid., p. 8 I.

part for the present-day reluctance, on the part of some, to adopt the computer. There was probably also an appreciation of the superior speed of the simple pile driver and a lack of interest in the chief point in which the hye outshone its rival-its ability to save on manpower. Before the industrial age, in contradistinction to our own age, labor was cheap and materials expensive. Besides, people probably preferred full employment to efficiency. Finally, technical expertise was in short supply among builders, so that a pile driver with a foolproof construction, or at least one where the repairs were easy, was bound to be popular. The history of the pile driver demonstrates once again that to concentrate on "firsts" in ideas or inventions is to distort the picture of how people lived in the past.