The Challenging Images of Artillery

Abstract

Princely families of old were in the habit of engaging historians who were charged with producing tailor-made histories, in which the achievements of these families received due attention. For a long time this, remarkably, was exactly what natural scientists also expected from their historians. As a matter of fact, from the point of view of developed science, the knowledge of a discipline is simply represented by the natural laws that define its object. It was accordingly a matter of course for its historians to concentrate solely on the question of who had discovered which of these laws when and in what manner. In this sense, the history of science is a biographically oriented, heroic history of the great discoverers and their discoveries (fig. 1).