Science and technology in the Ottoman Empire

During its 600-year existence, the Ottoman Empire made significant advances in science and technology, in a wide range of fields including mathematics, astronomy and medicine.

In 1795 the scope of the school was broadened to train technical military staff to modernize the Ottoman army to match the European standards.

He produced a Zij (named Unbored Pearl) and astronomical catalogues that were more accurate than those of his contemporaries, Tycho Brahe and Nicolaus Copernicus.

Taqi al-Din was also the first astronomer to employ a decimal point notation in his observations rather than the sexagesimal fractions used by his contemporaries and predecessors.

He used this method to calculate the eccentricity of the Sun's orbit and the annual motion of the apogee, and so did Copernicus before him, and Tycho Brahe shortly afterwards.

[8] After the destruction of the Constantinople observatory of Taqi al-Din in 1580, astronomical activity stagnated in the Ottoman Empire, until the introduction of Copernican heliocentrism in 1660, when the Ottoman scholar Ibrahim Efendi al-Zigetvari Tezkireci translated Noël Duret's French astronomical work (written in 1637) into Arabic.

His book contains detailed information on navigation, as well as accurate charts (for their time) describing the important ports and cities of the Mediterranean Sea.

The map was rediscovered by German theologian Gustav Adolf Deissmann in 1929 in the course of work cataloging items held by the Topkapı Palace library.

[10] Medicine in the Ottoman Empire was practiced in nearly all places of society as physicians treated patients in homes, markets, and hospitals.

The integralistic approach shaped the structure of the Ottoman hospital as each sector and group of workers was dedicated to treating a different aspect of the patient's well-being.

Music was regarded as a powerful healing tune and that different sounds had the ability to create different mental states of health.

Hospitals and related health-care institutions were referred to as a variety of names: dârüşşifâ, dârüssıhhâ, şifâhâne, bîmaristân, bîmarhâne, and timarhâne.

The bîmârîstân's medrese provided medical students with combined theoretical and clinical coursework through hospital internships.

Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu was the author of the Cerrahiyyetu'l-Haniyye (Imperial Surgery), the first illustrated surgical atlas, and the Mücerrebname (On Attemption).

[17] The education of the school was largely European-based, using texts in Italian or French and medical journals published in Europe.

Behçet Efendi founded the Imperial Medical School, Tıbhâne-I Âmire, of Istanbul in 1827 which was based on the following structural guidelines: the acceptance only of Muslim students, and the teachings would be almost entirely in French.

[22] The council eventually became an international organization with participation from European countries, the United States, Iran, and Russia.

[24] This hospital and the ones built after were structured similarly to the ones of the Seljuk Empire, where "even wounded crusaders preferred Muslim doctors as they were very knowledgeable.

[26] Ottoman Empire hospitals were primarily established and used for treating the sick then developed into centers for medical science teaching as well.

It was a hydropowered water-raising machine incorporating valves, suction and delivery pipes, piston rods with lead weights, trip levers with pin joints, and cams on the axle of a water-driven scoop-wheel.

The Ottoman engineer Taqi al-Din invented a mechanical astronomical clock, capable of striking an alarm at any time specified by the user.

In his treatise In The Nabk Tree of the Extremity of Thoughts, he wrote: "We constructed a mechanical clock with three dials which show the hours, the minutes, and the seconds.

Taqi al-Din described such a device in his book, Al-Turuq al-saniyya fi al-alat al-ruhaniyya (The Sublime Methods of Spiritual Machines), completed in 1551 AD (959 AH).

The Harquebus, "also spelled arquebus, also called hackbut, first gun fired from the shoulder, a smoothbore matchlock with a stock resembling that of a rifle".

To put things into perspective, this round was nearly 6 times larger than the main British tank caliber gun at 120mm.

Eventually the rifle as we know today ended the era of the musket Turkish arquebuses may have reached China before Portuguese ones.

Like many other great powers, the Ottomans issued the M1903 Mauser bolt-action rifle to its most elite front-line infantry and cavalry soldiers, also known as Janissaries.

[46] Officers in the Ottoman Empire Army were authorized to purchase their own personal handguns from the various number of European craftsmen.