Inventions of humane wit
Humane Industry, or, A History of Most Manual Arts, Deducing the Original, Progress, and Improvement of Them, by Thomas Powell. Printed in London by Henry Herringman, 1661.
Lower Library, K.12.4
Thomas Powell (1608鈥1660) was a Welsh clergyman, writer and translator. Educated at Oxford, he was appointed rector of Cantref in 1635. Because of his royalist sympathies, he was ejected from his parish in 1647 and was only restored to his duties in 1660, upon the Restoration, which happened shortly before his death.1
During his 13 years of unemployment, Powell dedicated himself to writing and translating. He translated works from French, Italian, Latin, and from English into Welsh. The subjects of his books were varied, ranging from Christian orthodoxy to Welsh history and practical sciences.
Humane Industry was published posthumously in 1661, and it explores an unexpectedly wide range of what its author called manual arts: from the invention of clocks and the crafts of writing, printing and painting, to the taming of wild animals. Reading its index today feels almost like browsing a Guinness World Records book. Some examples:
Baboon taught to play on the Guittar 鈥 Cloth made of wool fallen from the sky 鈥 Flea with a chain about her neck 鈥 Writing with the feet.2
Among hundreds of oddities the book features one of the earliest descriptions of a multiple-image pleated paper picture that changes as the viewer shifts position:
It is a pretty Art, that in a pleated paper [...] men make one picture to represent several faces; as one I have seen, that looking from one place or standing, represented Edward the Sixth; from another, Queen Elizabeth; and from a third place, King James.3
And Powell鈥檚 personal remarks on some of these human inventions often offer a glimpse of his own views on the matter. In a short passage about boats that can go under water, his comment reads: 鈥淲e are not now content to sail upon the waters, but we must sail under them too.鈥4
The most important invention of all, according to Powell (and we tend to agree), is described in chapter four:
Among all the Inventions and productions of humane Wit, there is none more admirable and more useful then Writing, by means whereof a man may coppy out & delineate his very thoughts and minde and make that visible which none can see but he that made it [...] and this by the help of four and twenty letters.5
After a description of different alphabets 鈥 鈥渢he Chinois have 40000 letters at least鈥 鈥 and different writing instruments and materials 鈥 鈥渋n some parts of the East they make paper of silk鈥 鈥 Powell dedicates a whole chapter to the invention of the printing press, or, as he calls it, the art of multiplying books. He is not certain, though, to whom humanity owes the invention, whether Gutenberg of Mainz in Germany or Laurence John of Haarlem in the Netherlands. After presenting compelling arguments in favour of both, Powell surprises the reader by saying:
Yet let not the Germans or any others be too proud of this Invention, for the Chinois had such an art long before the Europeans saw or heard any thing of it.6
Overall, his book blends history, geography and early scientific curiosity in a way that feels surprisingly eclectic for its time.
- S. W. Clavier, '' in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004鈥2024), online.
- Thomas Powell, Human Industry (1661), index.
- Thomas Powell, Human Industry (1661), 76.
- Thomas Powell, Human Industry (1661), 155.
- Thomas Powell, Human Industry (1661), 46.
- Thomas Powell, Human Industry (1661), 67.
