The history of the Middle Ages has a little more than 1000 years - from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century A.D. before the beginning of the 16th century - the period of the Reformation. The Dark Ages, as it is not quite right to call this period, proved to be very fruitful and brought the world many useful and useful discoveries.
Hourglass - XI Century
The hourglass was supposedly invented by sailors in the 11th century, as This device was used until the XIV century only on ships for time tracking. The watch complemented the magnetic compass and assisted in navigating the ship. But the only sources talking about this are ship's magazines. And only in 1328 the hourglass materialized on the canvases of Ambrosio Lorenzetti. Since the XV century, this device has gained great popularity and began to be used on land literally everywhere. This was the first accurate time meter. On ships appeared even special people responsible for the timely turning of the clock.
Blast furnace - XII century
The Middle Ages is a real era of iron. Knightly armor, weapons, household tools - began to make a lot of metal. Fusible ores ceased to meet the requirements of medieval civilization. They were replaced by refractory metals. And they needed completely different furnaces. Demand creates supply. And then shtukofen was invented - a prototype of a blast furnace. The first were built in Shtri and the Czech Republic. The temperature in them was higher, the melting was slower and more even. At the output, three grades of metal were obtained - cast iron, steel, ductile iron. The next step was blauofen - an inflatable stove, which was subsequently upgraded to a blast furnace.
Glasses - XIII Century
Glasses for sight, without which it is not possible to imagine modern civilization, were invented in the middle of the century. The earliest documented mention of them dates back to 1268 and belongs to Roger Bacon. The first portrait in which a man with glasses appears is the work of the Italian monk Tommaso da Modena 1352, depicting Hugh Provence, rewriting manuscripts. Round glasses are visible on the man.
Mechanical watch (XIII century)
Presumably, the mechanical clock was invented at the monastery to accurately determine the time of service, at which all the monks convened the monastery bell. The first mechanical clock was huge and fit into the tower. They had only an hour hand. The oldest surviving to this day are in Salisbury Cathedral (UK). They were created in 1386. The Rouen clocks of 1389 still have a debugged mechanism and work.
Quarantine - XIV Century
In the fourteenth century, plague epidemics increased with the growth of maritime trade. The realization that this terrible disease was imported by ships from the Levant, led to the introduction of precautionary measures in Venice, which were called quarantine from the Italian word "quaranta" - forty. Arriving ships were isolated for a period of 40 days, during which it was possible to find out whether there was a disease on the ship or not. The choice of the interval of exactly 40 days was determined by the choice of the gospel parable about the forty-day solitude of Christ in the wilderness.
In 1423, the first quarantine station, Lazaretto, was opened on an island near Venice. This excluded the transfer of the disease and its spread in the city. The quarantine system was adopted by other European countries.
