The book describes the collection of the Museum Engines and Mechanisms of the University of Palermo, Italy, one of the most important and heterogeneous collections of engines and mechanisms in Europe, the first one in Italy to be awarded as Mechanical Engineering Heritage Collection by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Thanks to its numerous items, this book showcases the evolution of fluid machinery and applied mechanics, from steam engines up to turbojet engines, as well as hybrid system, giving several technical and historical information about its most important engines, which are described in detail through pictures and original drawings. The Museum preserves and makes freely available this almost unique collection of more than 300 engines, didactic models, and technical equipment, including various unique exemplars, continuously enhanced thanks to donations and through restoration activities carried out in a dedicated laboratory of the Museum. As a result of a great deal of philological research carried out on the documents collected in the Museum’s archive, as well as in other institutional and corporate historical archives, this book serves as the reference tool of the collection and, more generally, of the Museum itself. Despite the technical subject and the academic environment in which it was created, the catalogue is realized to be read even by non-experts, offering different levels of detail, the first of which is the historical, economic and, in certain cases, even sporting context related to an engine, such as the vehicle for which it was designed and used.

This book treats several subjects from the History of Mechanism and Machine Science, and also contains an illustrative presentation of the Museum of Engines and Mechanisms of the University of Palermo, Italy, which houses a collection of various pieces of machinery from the last 150 years. The various sections deal with some eminent scientists of the past, with the history of industrial installations, machinery and transport, with the human inventiveness for mechanical and scientific devices, and with robots and human-driven automata. All chapters have been written by experts in their fields. The volume shows a wide-ranging panorama on the historical progress of scientific and technical knowledge in the past centuries. It will stimulate new research and ideas for those involved in the history of Science and Technology.

This book contains the proceedings of HMM2012, the 4th International Symposium on Historical Developments in the field of Mechanism and Machine Science (MMS). These proceedings cover recent research concerning all aspects of the development of MMS from antiquity until the present and its historiography: machines, mechanisms, kinematics, dynamics, concepts and theories, design methods, collections of methods, collections of models, institutions and biographies.