Ismail al-Jazari

He is best known for writing The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (Arabic: كتاب في معرفة الحيل الهندسية, romanized: Kitab fi ma'rifat al-hiyal al-handasiya, lit.

Sources state his exact location is unknown, but they speculate he could have been born in Jazirat ibn Umar, where he got the name Jazari from or Al-Jazira which was used to denote Upper Mesopotamia.

[8] Like his father before him, he served as chief engineer at the Artuklu Palace, the residence of the Mardin branch of the Artuqids which ruled across Upper Mesopotamia as vassals of the Zengid dynasty of Mosul and later of Ayyubid general Saladin.

[15] Al-Jazari was part of a tradition of artisans and was thus more a practical engineer than an inventor[16] who appears to have been "more interested in the craftsmanship necessary to construct the devices than in the technology which lay behind them" and his machines were usually "assembled by trial and error rather than by theoretical calculation".

[19] He also cites the influence of the Banū Mūsā brothers for his fountains, al-Saghani for the design of a candle clock, and Hibatullah ibn al-Husayn (d. 1139) for musical automata.

[22] The eccentrically mounted handle of the rotary quern-stone in fifth century BCE Spain that spread across the Roman Empire constitutes a crank.

[24] The earliest evidence of a crank and connecting rod mechanism dates to the 3rd century AD Hierapolis sawmill in the Roman Empire.

[8] English technology historian Donald Hill writes: We see for the first time in al-Jazari's work several concepts important for both design and construction: the lamination of timber to minimize warping, the static balancing of wheels, the use of wooden templates (a kind of pattern), the use of paper models to establish designs, the calibration of orifices, the grinding of the seats and plugs of valves together with emery powder to obtain a watertight fit, and the casting of metals in closed mold boxes with sand.

"[32] Lynn Townsend White wrote:[33] Western scholars had thought that conical valves first appeared in Leonardo's drawings, but al-Jazarl's pictures show them.

Similarly, segmental gears first clearly appear in al-Jazarl; in the West they emerge in Giovanni de’ Dondi's astronomical clock finished in 1364; with the great Sienese engineer Francesco di Giorgio (d. 1501) they entered the general vocabulary of European machine design.Al-Jazari invented five machines for raising water,[1] as well as watermills and water wheels with cams on their axle used to operate automata,[34] in the 12th and 13th centuries, and described them in 1206.

Saqiya machines like the ones he described have been supplying water in Damascus since the 13th century up until modern times,[35] and were in everyday use throughout the medieval Islamic world.

[43] According to Joseph Needham, al-Jazari's slot-rod force pump is one of "the two machines of the Middle Ages which lie most directly in the line of ancestry of the steam-engine and the locomotive" along with Wang Zhen's blowing engine a century later.

[47] Mark E. Rosheim summarizes the advances in robotics made by Muslim engineers, especially al-Jazari, as follows: Unlike the Greek designs, these Arab examples reveal an interest, not only in dramatic illusion, but in manipulating the environment for human comfort.

[48]The Arabs, on the other hand, displayed an interest in creating human-like machines for practical purposes but lacked, like other preindustrial societies, any real impetus to pursue their robotic science.

When the reservoir is nearly empty and most of the water has been poured a mechanism is prompted and the left hand of the figure, holding the towel, comb and mirror, is extended out in the direction of the king so that he can dry himself and tend to his beard.

Additionally, with Mesopotamia being a naturally drought-ridden place, machines relating to water held a significant function; in both a divine and practical sense.

[52] Al-Jazari's "peacock fountain" was a more sophisticated hand washing device featuring humanoid automata as servants which offer soap and towels.

[9] Al-Jazari created a musical automaton, which was a boat with four automatic musicians that floated on a lake to entertain guests at royal drinking parties.

[56] The mechanism in this specific automaton serves as a clock by producing a musical output once every hour, illustrating Al-Jazari's ability to create multi-faceted automata that functioned on a practical and entertainment level.

The motion of the automaton is initiated at daybreak by another male doll, who stands at the edge of the frieze element of the design, moving across until he reaches a specific point at which a carved falcon leans forward dropping a ball from its beak onto a cymbal.

It included a display of the zodiac and the solar and lunar orbits, and an innovative feature of the device was a pointer in the shape of the crescent moon which travelled across the top of a gateway, moved by a hidden cart, and caused automatic doors to open, each revealing a mannequin, every hour.

[9][62] Another feature of the device was five automata musicians who automatically play music when moved by levers operated by a hidden camshaft attached to a water wheel.

In The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, he gave instructions of his inventions and illustrated them using miniature paintings, a medieval style of Islamic art.