In the light of the current historiographical trends, that, in away individualize in the Renaissance the period that science and technology meet with, and on the other hand, they emphasize how descriptive documents are very much missing, underlining that schemes and projects are the only sources which can reconstruct the history. Consequently, the present paper aims to investigate on the work of Bernard Forest de Bélidor, who not only was he an officer and a mathematician, but also joined several scientific academies. We can safely say that Bélidor had been one the very few historians of Renaissance machines whose structure was scrupulously detailed especially in his great work Architecture hydraulique. Focusing on the main theme of the work — waters management for public purposes — Bélidor largely emphasized the six–seventeenth century mechanisms linked to pumps functioning. Bélidor had complained, on several occasions, about the indifference that “the theme itself” had experienced for two centuries.