How it began
Ismail al-Jazari was chief engineer to the court of the Artuqid rulers at Diyarbakır, in the southeast of present-day Turkey. His Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices was written in 1206, the year in which, according to the Public Domain Review, he died. His contemporaries called him unique and unrivaled, and he has since been nicknamed the father of robotics. The book records machines he designed for the court, among them a showering system for King Salih and devices for washing before prayer.
Before it existed
Al-Jazari did not start from nothing. The Public Domain Review notes that he stood on the shoulders of Persian, Greek, Indian and Chinese precursors. What his court wanted from an engineer shows in the contents of the book: ways to tell the time, vessels that poured and served by themselves at drinking sessions, basins for washing, fountains, and means of lifting water. He worked some three hundred years before the first patents were granted in fifteenth century Venice.
How it works
The book sets out about fifty devices in six groups: clocks; vessels and figures for drinking sessions; pitchers, basins and other washing devices; fountains and perpetual flutes; machines for raising water; and a miscellaneous group that includes a self-closing door. One figure serves wine at set intervals of an eighth of an hour. Others include mechanical birds that sing, a boat of mechanical musicians, segmental gears, and a chest secured by four combination dials. Researchers of the book also credit him with using the camshaft, with a double-acting pump and with advances in candle clocks.
What lasted
The book survived through copying. An anonymous copy bound in the seventeenth century is kept at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, an ornate pair of manuscripts is held in Leiden, and a copy made in 1315 is known from separate leaves. Later inventors of the Renaissance, in the words of the Public Domain Review, stood on his shoulders in turn. The drawings remain a main source for the mechanical engineering of the medieval Islamic world.
