An intricate peacock basin from al-Jazari’s Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (opaque watercolor, gold, and ink on paper).

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AL-JAZARI’S AUTOMATA

The polymath, inventor, artist, and engineer Ismail al-Jazari (1136–1206) lived during the height of the Islamic Golden Age, following his father as the chief engineer at the Artuklu Palace in Anatolia (present-day Diyarbakır, Turkey). Al-Jazari’s Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices—written at the request of his royal employer and published the year al-Jazari died—contains descriptions of numerous mechanical devices that al-Jazari had built, including moving human and animal automata as well as water-raising machines, fountains, and clocks. During his research and engineering, al-Jazari employed camshafts, crankshafts, escapement wheels, segmental gears, and other sophisticated mechanisms.

Among his automata are moving peacocks driven by water, a waitress that serves drinks, and a musical robot band of four automatic musicians in a boat with changing facial expressions that were controlled by rotating shafts. Some researchers have speculated that the movements of the robot band may have been programmable, indicating an extra degree of technical sophistication. His elephant clock featured a humanoid robot striking a cymbal at regular intervals, along with a robotic bird that chirped as a scribe rotated, marking out time with his pen. Al-Jazari’s 11-foot-tall (3.4 m) castle clock featured five automaton musicians.

According to English engineer and historian Donald R. Hill (1922–1994), who is famous for his English translation of al-Jazari’s work, “It is impossible to over-emphasize the importance of al-Jazari’s work in the history of engineering. Until modern times there is no other document from any cultural area that provides a comparable wealth of instructions for the design, manufacture, and assembly of machines. No doubt this is partly due to the fact that there was usually a social and cultural divide between those who made and those who wrote. When a scholar described a machine that had been constructed by an illiterate craftsman, he was usually interested in the finished product; he neither understood nor cared about the messy business of construction. . . . We therefore owe a great debt to [al-Jazari’s employer] for our possession of a unique document.”