Middle Ages: the treadwheel crane, the ancestor of elevator

The history of elevators has always been intertwined with the evolution of technology at the service of Humanity. During the Middle Ages, especially in Europe, the winch system was used inside castles and mountain monasteries that were particularly impervious, to lift people and goods. The problem of defying gravity was often solved with more or less complex projects of cranes… Specifically, in the period of the High Middle Ages, there was what some might have seen as a small step backwards; the treadwheel crane was reintroduced on a large scale after the technology had fallen into disuse in Western Europe, after the end of the Western Roman Empire. From the point of view of the documents that have come down to us, the first reference to a wheel (“magna rota”) appears in the archival literature in France, around 1225… Their typical use was inside the port areas, in the mines and, in particular, in the construction sites; here, in fact, the treadwheel crane played the role of protagonist in the pharaonic projects of construction of the very high Gothic cathedrals. In addition to the wheels, medieval representations also show cranes operated manually by windlasses with radiating spokes, cranks and from the 15th century also by windlasses shaped like a ship’s wheel. The recovery of the use of the treadwheel crane could be closely connected to the technological development of the windlass from which the wheel evolved structurally and mechanically. Alternatively, the medieval wheel could represent a reinvention narrated by Vitruvius in De Architectura, a work widely spread in many monastic libraries. Its reintroduction could also have been favored by the considerable saving of work of the water wheel with which the first wheels shared many structural similarities. In any case, even in the Middle Ages man continued to look at the sky to study how to proceed easily, towards the clouds, towards progress…