Al-Jazari

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Diagram from a book by Al-Jazari.
Diagram from a book by Al-Jazari.
The reciprocating pump from Al-Jazari's manuscript.
The reciprocating pump from Al-Jazari's manuscript.
The elephant clock from Al-Jazari's manuscript.
The elephant clock from Al-Jazari's manuscript.
Al-Jazari humanoid robots.
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]

  • 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]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
This article about an engineer, inventor or industrial designer is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.