The Joy of Sectors: Getting our Galileo on...

"For the eye is always in search of beauty, and if we do not gratify its desire for pleasure by a proportionate enlargement in these measures, and thus make compensation for ocular deception, a clumsy and awkward appearance will be presented to the beholder."   

- Vitruvius, De Architectura 

Of course, a major part of the "rebirth" heralded by the renaissance was a revival of the mathematics and geometries of the Arabs and the ancients. By harkening back to the glories of their Hellenic ideal with their domes and pillars, the Renaissance brought with it a new and almost slavish devotion to finding the sacred in geometry and symmetry. Not just buildings, but furniture and textiles began to push painted, woven, and carved decorations to ostentatious heights.

I'm not particularly well known for being good at math and certainly didn't receive high enough marks in school to give one the feeling I would go on to write fluently about engineering and architecture. Thankfully, our typical renaissance artisan wasn't particularly well known as a mathematician either.

Please note that here I am drawing a line between the theory and the application of maths. Although the loftier theories may have passed him by, the practical maths of proportion and symmetry were alive and well in 16th century workshops. The average Elizabethan joiner may or may not have known who Euclid or Pythagoras was, but he could apply their theories well enough to please the eye and the customer.

We've discussed some basics of dividers before, when we were coopering. Add a sector and by their powers combined, you can accomplish an amazing number of tasks with very little actual number-crunching.

I first learned the magic of the sector in the same math class where I learned about the Fibonacci and the various permutations of the Golden Mean. Then I didn't think about it much for several decades.

Like most woodworkers, I've always kept a set of dividers. Dividers are handy for drawing circles and arcs for those fantastically symmetrical carvings I mentioned, also transferring dimensions from a ruler or a drawing to the wood. I've used them for laying out dovetails and for finding center and a host of other simple tricks.

But when they're accompanied by a sector, they can do much, much more.

My geometry teacher knew that the wickedly-sharp compasses we were equipped with as part of our standard kit were capable of more than stabbing us through our canvas bookbags. When paired with a sector, they could be used to accomplish great feats of proportion and scale

And she had no less a personage than Galileo Galilei backing her up on that.

I didn't care, I was nine; I wanted to draw circles and stab ants with the damn thing. Education is wasted on the young. Sometimes, I think adults should be required to repeat primary school periodically to pick up all the sharing and math and social studies that we missed, never mind the history. We seem so determined to keep repeating our history anyway, it might as well be in a classroom.

"I'm sorry, boss, I can't come in today, I have geometry class and then detention because I said I was thinking about voting for Donald Trump..."

Anyway... flash forward to a 2011 issue of Popular Woodworking magazine I picked up at the newsstand because of a cool cover article about Thomas Jefferson's stacking bookcases. Inside was an article by Jim Tolpin on the use of the dividers combined with a sector (see the video below) to derive a host of useful proportions and measurements for cabinetry design.

Like my teacher before him, Jim attributed the invention of the the sector to Galileo. I'm a big Galileo fan, going way back, and ere the end of things, we might even get into some of his experiments with optics because I enjoy that sort of thing.

Galileo's Sector displayed in the Putnam Gallery -- Image via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0

They were both likely wrong about the inventor. The basic principles were first proposed by Euclid and put to various uses since. It seems more likely that he was the Bill Gates or Steve Jobs of the late Renaissance. He was a technological entrepreneur who envisioned new and popular uses by combining existing technologies and concepts in unique ways. That said, who initially turned a compass into a more complex instrument matters little, because ere the end of the 16th century, the concept broke out in a Big Way in the manner that technological leaps always seem to.

The sector as Galileo created it is partly well known because of who he was, and partly because it was enormously successful as a commercial product. The sales of the instruments made his fortune long before he started tweaking the beards of the Inquisition with his planetary models.

Galileo primarily sold his sector as a military tool, an instrument which in addition to its more basic Euclidean functions carried additional scales useful for the gunner in the trenches.

I have no use at the moment for determining powder loads and trajectories. There just aren't that many armies out there right now that need that sort of thing done the old fashioned way. I will be making a simpler, significantly less schmancy, workingman's sector along the same lines as Jim Tolpin's.

If nothing else, I have a lot of period carving and surface decoration on my project list, so we can look forward to seeing great granddad's dividers and sectors come out for that.

And for now -- since sectors weren't all that widely used until the 17th century anyway -- that will be the soft limits for our use for the things. I'll make a couple in different sizes and we shall see what use can be made of them without gunpowder getting involved.

That said, the Honorable Artillery Company was knocking about, but they weren't really what you'd call a trade guild. Nevertheless, I picked up a copy of Galileo's instruction book that was sold alongside his sector because you never know when you might need to hit something a long way away with a ball of something fired out of a tube full of grey powder.

- Scott

Scenes from a Renaissance Bakery

The "Production Scale Renaissance Bakery" experiment continues...

There are certain fringe benefits of working an outdoor kitchen. The view, for instance, is quite often simply amazing.

This was the scene Friday evening on the edge of the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire that is dedicated to living history displays. A group of friends of ours who teach period games sits next to us and beyond that, the military encampment where Goode's Company of Foote and the Salle St George demonstrate the life and martial studies of a renaissance soldier.

By the way, I'm convinced that the whole "Red sky at night/sailor's delight" thing is a lie. I may not be a sailor, but even I know that a beautiful sky like that presages nothing but trouble.  Sure enough, six hours after this photo was taken, the temperature stopped falling and began to rise as a thunderstorm moved north out of the Mount Rainier National Park, split around the flanks of the mountain, and fell on us like the wrath of a vengeful god.

Now, contrary to what you might see on television shows like Grey's Anatomy, it hardly ever thunders or downpours in the Seattle area. We generally have too many mountains and too much water. Fronts that create thunderheads get snagged and chopped up on the peaks that surround our cities.

This storm front missed that memo.

Those of us who hail not from the placid weather patterns of the Pacific Northwest, but from the center portion of the United States where the weather frequently and actively tries to kill you, watched the clouds surround our campsite with some trepidation. While lightning danced across the surrounding hilltops, I sat with two friends (both also from the plains states) drinking beer and speculating about what it felt like to get hit by 1.21 gigawatts of electricity. As the rain started to fall, we began to retreat to our cars, urging our northwestern friends to do likewise. Better to weather the storm in a Faraday cage (which is what a car is, if you think about it) than in a canvas box suspended from lightning rods (which is what a tent is if you think about it, God help you).

I've known people who died sleeping in tents during a storm. I learned early in life the lesson "Thou shalt not mess with the storm".

So it was that the engineer and I spent half the night in sporadic catnaps amid the relative discomforts of a rain-drenched vehicle. So it was that once the storm passed and the day dawned (all assembled were thankfully unhurt no matter where they spent the night) it was a cranky and ill-tempered brood of bakers that greeted the morning's light.

Well... everyone except for that guy. I told him that naming his horse "DeLorean" wasn't going to be enough to get it up to 88 miles per hour...  

The things we'll do for the sake of a project, I swear.

A Day Weekend In the Life...

A baker's life is not one that allows for much in the way of sleeping in. We admittedly don't get up nearly as early as the bakers of yore since the festival does not open its gates until 10:00. But there's still precious little time for catching up on storm-addled dreams as the unrelenting mistresses of beer, bread, and hearth beckon.

I and my fellow bakers are up and tending our hearth by 7:00 in order to be ready to have bread coming out by the time the patrons begin filtering in.  In our first weekend at our new trade, we had nothing but trouble with an oven that hadn't yet dried to a point where it would give back the heat we put into it in an efficient manner.



Friday evening, I got to site early and rebuilt the oven's mouth, making it a bit deeper and doing what I could to increase the wall thickness (with mixed results). The reason I had a fire in the oven for that picture up top was to dry out the new cob I'd added. And that fire was the main reason I was still awake in the wee hours, sitting with soldiers and watching the approaching storm. A hot oven can't go under a tarp.

The oven was barely cool enough to get tarped when the storm rolled in and Saturday morning, condensation on the inside of the tarp had made a bit of a mess out of what was already a bit of a messy application of clay to the outside.

We over-compensated and fired it way too long, the result of which was burning the first batch of bread for the day because it must've been at least 700 degrees fahrenheit when we put the dough in.

Nevertheless, we got our feet under us and kept our hands in the dough all day, totally on Saturday alone more than our entire previous weekend's output.

For all the time I spend with tools, there are some simple things that I just didn't know how to do, skills that I might never have noticed my lack of were it not for this project. For instance, this year, I had to teach myself how to peel an apple or a potato with a knife instead of a peeler. (Turns out I needn't have bothered, when it came time to make the apple tart, The Engineer was already a dab hand with a knife... of course.)

At the end of the first day, we had totalled more loaves than we'd baked the entire first weekend. By the end of the day on Saturday, we'd more than doubled it.

I've been going to renaissance faires in one capacity or another for quite some time. They crack me up for both what they are and what the most assuredly are not. What they aren't is Living History in any sense. Faire is essentially a theatrical enterprise. Participants are either cast in specific roles or create their own and are expected to act the part. Historical fact plays second or third fiddle to entertainment and that's just how it goes. Welcome to ye olde theme parke.

People who cannot handle that don't last long.

This was my first real experiment in something that I think we can (I think) genuinely describe as living history. My crew spent the entire day either baking or explaining what we were doing to the onlookers. And boy did we draw a crowd. I explained the principles of oven construction hundreds of times. People are/were fascinated by what we were about, challenged me on what ingredients I'd have had and where I got them in a 16th century context.

As a card-carrying nerd, I'm not ashamed to admit it was some of the most fun I think I've ever had in public. We educated a lot of people, we made over 100 loaves of bread, and -- if comments are to be believed -- might have even inspired a minor oven-building boom in the Pacific Northwest.

Now that's what I call a job well done.

The Engineer channels a character from a Breugel painting as she measures out the flour for a new batch. She's even wearing wooden shoes though you can't see them here....

Kill It with Fire Part Three: Fifty faire loaves and counting...

It may not always come across when I'm writing, but I'm acutely aware that it's one thing to play at a profession from days of yore, and it is another thing entirely to actually attempt to perform a trade at a professional level of production, not to mention quality. 

The baker's got big ol' pants, oh yeah...

It seems unavoidable that to do a single project or even a series of projects that touch on the tools and skills of a profession and then move on to something else imparts only a surface understanding of the real daily existence of the craftsman working night and day just to keep food on the table. I'm just one guy with one life to live. How different is it to brew five gallons of weak ale compared to brewing thousands of gallons of strong ale to meet demand and fill orders outstanding? Thimbles, pins, barrels, furniture, bread, tools, hats… all of these trade goods take on a different dimension when viewed from the perspective of mass production instead of one-off projects.

This past weekend, I found myself trying to really do this thing and it just might be my favorite thing I’ve done so far.

Awhile back I mentioned that a group I founded had been hired to create renaissance cooking and baking demonstrations at the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire. Originally we wanted to do a full-on historical cooking show, but it quickly became clear that was putting the cart before the horse. So it is that over the course of the last three weeks, I’ve been laboring to build another oven on the WMRF site and then this past weekend we used it to produce a lot of bread.

Eventually, I would still like this to grow into a full-on live cooking show. Sort of an Elizabethan version of Good Eats that delves into the what, why, and how of renaissance fare. At the moment, though, we have enough to do just coming to grips with the logistics and obstacles of cooking in a period manner in a period setting.

No lights no phones, no motor cars, not a single luxury…

It is pretty rustic, though. This is a picture of me
warming a cup of beer to a temperature that I
hope won't kill the yeast... with a hot tent stake. 

Okay, that’s a lie; it’s a renaissance faire, not a desert island. This is Seattle -- there’s a parking lot full of cars and you can’t throw a bun without hitting an iPhone. But we’re still baking bread with the heat from a fire while wearing silly clothes in the middle of a hay field.

This past weekend (after a slow start owing to an oven that hadn’t sufficiently dried out yet to really go into production) the Engineer and I produced fifty loaves of bread. The Engineer made eight loaves of the loveliest rosemary herbed bread and  and our compatriot Becky made a lovely apple tart. 

By the end of the weekend, we had furnished the tables of almost every other group at faire (apologies if we missed you) with delicious loaves of bread. And we've been taking orders for this weekend and accepting bribes to get higher on the delivery list. (I'm an artisan, not a saint.)

I don’t know how that stacks up to the output of a professional bakery. Small beer, I'd wager, but nevertheless I don’t personally know anyone outside of the baking profession that walks out into the middle of a field one day and decides to build an oven and bake fifty-odd loaves of bread all in one go...

Mine really is a very special and specific kind of insanity.

I have to admit that it hurt a little bit. Monday morning, my hands and forearms ached like nobody's business. A friend of mine who used to be a baker before giving it all up for the exciting world of certified accountancy laughed and said “Where do you think I got my Popeyes?” (I always wondered why his forearms were so big… I didn't ask about the anchor tattoos.) The skin on my hands is raw and feels callused from the heat and abrasion of the whole wheat and barley flour we were using. I have tiny blisters from burns I didn’t even notice until I got home and my head is still full of the smell of woodsmoke.

And I loved every minute of it.  I can't wait to go out there this weekend and do it all over again. Awhile back I said that coopering was the only job so far that I could picture myself doing as a vocation. Baking now officially tops that list.

I may have an addiction forming. Ah well, at least flour is cheaper when you buy it fifty pounds at a time...

Calculations, Coopering, Cats, and Cooking: Current events

Sorry I've been remiss this week. All of a sudden, there are a lot of balls in the air and I'm rushing to catch as many as possible before they hit the ground.

Calculations:

The Engineer doesn't want you to think she can't figure out the inside angles of a polygon. She just didn't see the point in giving me the answers.

Can't just tell me the answer, oh no, that would be cheating. I manage a tutoring center for a living. Math people. Go figure. Like any good teacher, she helped me get there on my own.

I should have known better than to think I could get out of this without learning some math.

Anyway, I've decided that there are eight staves in the tankard I'm making, so that makes it an octagon. Thankfully, this chap named Euclid wrote some books on geometry way back when* and that shifts things into the realm of history. Which moves the ball back to my side of the net.

The formula for determining the interior angle of a regular polygon is simple enough. The number of sides minus 2, times 180 and then divided by the number of sides. (No, I didn't know that, I looked it up.) That gives you 135 degrees.

Then, as any woodworker can tell you, you halve the angle to determine the angle of your cut. The bevel on each side of the stave for an eight-piece bit of coopering is 67.5 degrees.
So there.

Then I Googled it to check my work and discovered a lot of websites where I could just type all those variables in and let it figure it all out for me. Seriously. How do people not pass math classes these days?

*Note: Whatever it might normally mean, "Way back when" is now officially 300 BC. Just so you know.

Coopering:

In the meantime, in case you missed the post yesterday, I'm hard at work making that stave tankard I was calculating earlier.

Here's an article about another one of the same sort that was found in the mud along the Thames by a mudlark. These things are pretty big by modern standards. According to the article, it holds three pints. The Mary Rose one I'm basing mine on holds 8 pints, probably as storage for a sailor's beer ration.

Unless I'm way off, I calculate that mine will hold roughly two pints.

Cats:

We've adopted a new 9 month old kitten from the Tacoma Humane Society. Our other two cats are boys and The Engineer was feeling outnumbered by all the Y chromosomes. Also, one of our cats will turn 15 years old this year and he's slowing down a bit. Which means the 7 year old -- who is naturally runs in the neighborhood of 25 lbs anyway -- is getting torpid because he doesn't have an active sibling to play with.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Cleo. She's our newest family member and I'm sure she'll be in charge in no time at all. 

Cooking:

In my bio I say that I'm not a reenactor or a member of any of the reenacting groups. And that's true, but it's not for lack of trying. Long ago, I attempted to create a group of my own, centering on Renaissance foodways, centered around a guild of actors at the Washington Renaissance Fantasy Faire.

We called ourselves Saint Brigid's Hearth, named so in honor of a dear friend.

The reality of setting up and creating a reenactment troupe was a bit more involved than I gave credit for. It was rather like setting up and running a small business.  The from-scratch nature of this meant building more or less from scratch, beginning with costume and characterization.

In short, the acting concerns outweighed the reenacting concerns.  That was a number of years ago and in the interim, the ren faire where we originated fell and a new faire arose to replace it. I pressed the guild into other hands and moved on to other things as they continued as an acting troupe for awhile before fading away as Real Life Concerns drew the attentions of the actors and the guild went dormant. 

That's when serendipity took over: I conceived of and began this project.  A project that will include cooking, baking, brewing, bricklaying, and other things that will be of concern to the craftsmen who built and used the kitchens of the renaissance.

Over the course of the past few months, I've been in negotiations with the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire to revive the group as a proper reenactment society. To build a period-appropriate kitchen on the faire site and do cooking demonstrations. To make history entertaining and trick people into maybe learning something.



This week, the last of the i's and t's were dotted and crossed (not everything in this post can start with a c...) and I turned in the final designs and addressed the fire concerns for the wood-fired bread oven. So the Renaissance Artisan will team up with St. Brigid's. The prototype oven will be built in my back yard as part of this project, and then in late July we will duplicate it on the faire site.

"Because he needed something else to do?" is probably what you're saying, but there's nothing in the presentation of foodways to a ren faire crowd that I'm not already going to be saying to you.

And I'm not going to be doing it alone.

It's going to be more than just "The School of the Renaissance Artisan in front of a live studio audience" because St Brigid isn't about me. It's about providing a community of and for other people with the same aim as me: to celebrate the workaday peacetime world of renaissance England.