Jacques Alexandre (1653-1734) was a Benedictine monk from Orléans in France who devoted his life to the study of mechanics, physics and mathematics in the monastery at Vendôme. The engravings here are from one of the earliest french works on horology (the art of clockmaking) - Traité général des horloges - published in 1734.
The treatise records the known history of horology to the time of writing and outlines in detail the various mechanisms of a timepiece by way of technical dictionary, accompanied by precise engravings of which there are 27 page plates in total.
Alexandre wasn't particularly driven to publish all of the papers his intellectual enquiries produced but he did issue a book about the nature of tides that relied on the belief that the earth rotated around the moon. Despite the obvious error, it contributed to the overall body of work on the subject.
- Traité général des horloges by Jacques Alexandre is online at the Florence Institute and Museum of the History of Science but you'll need to go to page 4 of the digital library - I can't extract the URL from the javascript. I don't complain about this site though. It's well stocked and pretty easy to use - hit the icon that looks like a mountain to get thumbnail views of all illustrations in any publication.
- Bookseller review of Traité général des horloges
- Catholic encylopedia on Jacques Alexandre
- Glossary of horological terms
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