Nicolas Grollier de Servière

Nicolas Grollier de Servière
Grollier's reading wheel
Born	1596 Lyon, France
Died	1689 Lyon, France
Occupation	Model maker, inventor and wood turner
Spouse	Yes

Nicolas Grollier de Servière (1596–1689) was a French inventor and ornamental turner who became well known for creating a series of fantastic machines.

Grollier de Servière was born in Lyon and in his youth followed a military career that took him to Flanders, Germany, Italy and Constantinople; as an engineer, he specialized in deploying movable bridges in the field. After he retired to his home in Lyon, he worked on ornamental lathe-work and built a series of fantastic models. He displayed his work in a cabinet that he opened to the public once a week and which became famous enough to attract politicians, scholars, artisans and other inventors. It featured model water pumps and Archimedes screws, siege engines, designs of floating bridges and clocks regulated by balls travelling down inclined planes or along spiral tracks, machines to trace landscape and to convert plan images into perspective, odometers with reducing gears, wheelchairs, many intricate pieces of lathe-work in ivory and wood, and an improved version of Agostino Ramelli's reading wheel that allowed many books to be read by means of a rotating wheel. Eventually even Louis XIV paid a visit to Grollier de Servière.

After his death in 1689, his son Gaspard (1646–1716) and then his grandson Gaspard II (1676–1745) continued to display the contents of the cabinet, and his son published a book cataloguing the curiosities: Recueil d'Ouvrages Curieux de Mathématique et de Mécanique, ou Description du Cabinet de Monsieur Grollier de Servière. Charles Plumier, who visited the cabinet after Nicholas Grollier de Serviere's death, wrote the first book about wood turning, L'Art du Tourneur (The Art of the Turner), in 1701. A model of a water driven pile-driver which Grollier de Servière had built on his grounds was given to Stephen Demainbray in 1754 and is now preserved in the George III Collection in the London Science Museum.

References

• Joseph Connors (1990). "Ars Tornandi: Baroque Architecture and the Lathe". Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (III): 217–36. http://www.columbia.edu/~jc65/cvlinks/tornandi.html. Retrieved 21 November 2006. 
• "One of the 17th Century's Most Celebrated and Fantastic Cabinets". Joslin Hall. http://www.joslinhall.com/g-20741.htm. Retrieved 21 November 2006. ^{[dead link]}
• "The King George III Collection". Science Museum. http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/collections/exhiblets/george3/demapp.asp. Retrieved 21 November 2006. ^{[dead link]}
• "Exposition à la Réserve : Livres anciens, rares ou précieux récemment signalés dans le catalogue de la Bibliothèque" (in French). La Réserve: Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. http://www-bsg.univ-paris1.fr/la_reserve/exp2001b1.htm. Retrieved 21 November 2006. 
• John Powell (Ed.) (2006). Great Events from History: The 18th Century. Salem Press. ISBN 1-58765-279-X. https://salempress.com/Store/pdfs/great_events_from_history_18th.pdf. Retrieved 21 November 2006. 

Persondata
Name	Servière, Nicolas Grollier de
Alternative names	Serviere, Nicolas Grollier de; Grollier, Nicolas; Grollier de Servière
Short description	French inventor and engineer
Date of birth	1596
Place of birth	Lyon, France
Date of death	1689
Place of death	Lyon, France