Al-Jazari

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Diagram from a book by Al-Jazari.

The reciprocating pump from Al-Jazari's manuscript.

The elephant clock from Al-Jazari's manuscript.

Al-Jazari humanoid robots.

Ibn Ismail Ibn al-Razzaz Al-Jazari (Arabic: بديع الزمان ابو العز بن إسماعيل بن الرزاز الجزاري)I (1206 AD) was an important Arab Islamic mechanical engineer and scholar of the middle ages. He was called Al-Jazari after the area where he was born, Al-Jazira, which is the traditional Arabic name for northern Mesopotamia (in modern-day Syria and Iraq, between the Tigris and the Euphrates). He served the Ortukids a Turkmen dynasty in Diyarbakır as a chief engineer - as did his father before him.

He invented the crankshaft and some of the first mechanical clocks, driven by water and weights. He authored 60 inventions in his book "Al-Jami Bain Al-Ilm Wal-Amal Al-Nafi Fi Sinat'at Al-Hiyal".

Al-Jazari described fifty mechanical devices in six different categories, including water clocks (one of his famous clocks was reconstructed successfully at the London Science Museum in 1976), combination locks, hand washing device, machines for raising water, double acting pumps with suction pipes and the use of a crank shaft in a machine, accurate calibration of orifices, lamination of timber to reduce warping, static balancing of wheels, use of paper models to establish a design, casting of metals in closed mould boxes with green sand, and more. He is also credited for the first recorded designs of a programmable humanoid robot. [1]

[edit] References

Al-Jazarí, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices : Kitáb fí ma'rifat al-hiyal al-handasiyya, Springer, 1973 [2]
Hill, Donald Routledge, A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times, 1996 [3]