Week 11 History Essay

          The four inventions I have learned about this week are universities, the wine press, the ribbed vault, and the chimney. I will tell you about each of them. First, I learned about universities, which are schools for higher learning. The Roman Catholic Church invented them in the 12th and 13th centuries AD, because the church wanted to train people to work in government, since the church was now more powerful than the government. Universities are very important to history, because people can keep learning and get better and better jobs. The second invention is the wine press. The wine press is a machine used to extract the juice from crushed grapes to make wine. It was invented by the Romans, but made better by the Christian monks in the 2nd Century AD. The monks needed a way to make more wine for the church ceremonies. Wine presses are still used today all over the world to make wine. The third invention was the ribbed vault, which is a style of building a ceiling in a building. It was much prettier than the styles before it, and it made the building stronger. The first ribbed vault was built by Abbot Suger around 1135 AD. It changed history by changing the style of building to the Gothic style. The last invention was the chimney, which is a vent that lets smoke leave a building. People could now have fires in their homes to stay warm, without having all the smoke inside. We still use chimneys in many homes today. These inventions were really interesting to learn about this week.