Introduction

Al-Jazari opened  “The Book Of Knowledge Of  Ingenious Mechanical Devices”  with a monumental clock, perhaps the most complex of all ten water clocks and candle clocks explained in the book: The Castle Clock.

Sometimes you know you read a wonderful book the second  you read the first paragraph:

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.”

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

In the right hands, the beginning of a novel can make you feel like you were abducted from reality and you are drifting down a river which will take you to other worlds. Not only engineers who open al-Jazari’s book are captured immediately by its magic of the machines he designed eight hundred years ago. We will never know if al-Jazari wanted a powerful opening to demonstrate his ability at its best, or he positioned machines at random order and was surprised by the very question? This post hopes to explain the Castel Clock as well as discuss what we can about al-Jazari from the text.

How does it work?

The Castle Clock had a complicated movement throughout the day, and it is on the boundary between a clock and an automaton(a machine that performs a function according to a predetermined set of instructions). There is something theatrical in many automata. Sometimes it is by design, like the automata in Greek theater used for “Deus ex machina”, literally “god from the machine”. Sometimes there are other objectives like the lion automaton built by Leonardo da Vinci for François I^er, king of France. When the King tapped the lion with his sword, its body opened and presented lilies, a symbol associated with the French royalty. The clock by al-Jazari is also very theatrical.

At the beginning of the day all twenty-four doors, in two rows, are closed and the Golden Crescent,  which is a little hard to see in the picture, is positioned to the left. During the day, the half-moon is moving right, and  every hour three things are happening:

• The upper doors open and a figure comes out and stands as if he had suddenly emerged.
• The lower door is rotating on its axis, and the text “Allah al-Malik” meaning ” God is The King and Owner of “
• The Two falcons with outspread wings lean forward and cast a bronze ball into a vase, inside the vase a cymbal is hung, making a sound which can be heard from afar.

The picture of the falcon is taken from a dream or myth. Horus is one of the most significant ancient Egyptian deities. He was most often depicted as a falcon. Horus had many battles with Seth, the god of the desert, in which he lost his left eye, then a new eye was created for him called “the eye of the Moon” or “the diamond” and symbolizes an endless vision. I have no reason to assume that al-Jazari was familiar with Egyptian mythology, but who knows?

Above the upper row of doors, we can see the Zodiac sphere. At the beginning of the day, the sun will be on the eastern horizon, about to rise. The sun climbs until noon, then descends until nightfall and the six signs that have been visible will disappear, and the six that have been hidden will appear. At noon the drummers drum, the trumpeters blow, and the cymbalist plays his cymbals for a while.

Al-Jazari does not write anything about the reason for multiple mechanisms to display the time. The crescent actually functions as a modern analog clock hand, and the rest are just “decoration” and maybe a resonance box. In the world of modern engineering, it could be considered excessive and even wasteful, but there is magic that passes through centuries of the Falcons even if there is no additional information.

Erich Kästner, the wonderful author of Pünktchen und Anton(Dot and Anton in English), was concerned:   ” By the children who would prefer to eat porridge for three days than deal with such complex issues as his reflections [my translation from Hebrew]. He came up with a different font “so if you see something like that you can skip it altogether…” It seems to me this even more needed for technical explanations of engineers that will be in blue.

The Castle Clock is a sophisticated version of the classical water clock or clepsydra where time is measured by the regulated flow of out a vessel where the amount is then measured.  The difficulty is that the water flow rate is not uniform and depends on pressure (altitude) of the water in the vessel. To overcome this problem, al-Jazari used a conical plug and the float chamber.

The main reservoir is feeding the float chamber through a conical plug thus whenever the water level drops the valve (a float that is a plug in a cone shape) goes down with the water level allowing the chamber to be refilled. Every time the chamber is full of water, the conical plug will seal the chamber isolating it from the main reservoir. In this way, the float chamber is always full of water and therefore the water flow at a constant rate and does not depend on the height of the water in the main reservoir.

 

At Sunrise a servant makes sure that all doors are closed and the time cart is on the right side (looking from the back). During the day water will flow at a rate determined by the flow regulator and the main float would drop with the water level at the main reservoir. The main float is made of copper, and it is quite heavy.  When it drops, it pulls the rope, which through the pulley would turn the main disk and pull the time cart attached to the golden crescent which would move to the left at a constant velocity indicating the time passed from sunrise. Every hour the cart will progress one door, and a smart mechanism would open the doors while dropping down two bronze balls. The balls would roll down and reach an opening above the heads of the Falcons. The curving claws of the Falcons are welded to a copper tube that can rotate on its axis. The falcon stands upright because of a balancing weight. When the bronze ball drops down, it changes the balance, and the falcon would lean forward, and the falcon wings, attached to a body on a hinge will spread open, and the ball will fall on the cymbal hidden in the vase. Now that the falcon head is light again, the balancing weight will bring him to its original position. The clock is packed with similar invention and  “patents”.

The book contains almost 50 pages explaining the various mechanisms with detailed construction instructions. Readers who are interested in the details can learn them here and see the simulation here

 

What did I learn about Al-Jazari?

We have no information about al-Jazari except what is in the text itself. We can “pick” the book to learn about al-Jazari and his world. Consider the adjustable flow regulator intended to ensure that the clock movement fits the changing length of the day. This controller is a small engineering marvel itself, but I am interested in it because of the triple encounter it offers with al-Jazari and his world:

• First, al-Jazari is a man who is familiar with the literature of his time. The opening lines of the Castle clock chapter are: “I followed the method of the excellent Archimedes in distributing the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Al-Jazari is probably referring “On the construction of water clock” – كتاب أرشميدس في عمل البنكامات. This book was attributed to Archimedes, but its source is unclear. This reinforces al-Jazari statement in the introduction:

“I have studied the books of the earlier [scholars] and the works of the later [craftsmen] –masters of ingenious devices with movements like pneumatic [movements], and water machines … I considered the treatment of this craft for a period of time and I progressed, by practicing it, from the stage of book learning to that of witnessing, and I have taken the view on this matter of some of the ancients and those more recent [scholars]. “

The question of openness or seclusion to the world for people of faith is a relevant question even today for Jews or Muslims.    Maimonides, Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon, the most important rabbinical arbiters in Jewish history, and polymath, scientist, and  physician lived almost in the same time frame in Cordoba, far away from Diyarbakir in Anatolia but he was a part of the same  Muslim world. During his medical studies, he was introduced to the writings of Aristotle in natural science and did not feel any threat to his faith. He even wrote:

” Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics.” Guide for the Perplexed

It’s amazing to read when today Orthodox Jewish children are forbidden to learn mathematics or natural sciences. Al-Jazari, more engineer than a philosopher, does not deal with matters of faith directly, but his faith is embedded in the text. This doesn’t bother him at all to read and learn from pagan scholars.

• Secondly, in Diyarbakir in eastern Turkey, there are little more than fourteen hours of daytime in the summer and approximately nine hours of daytime in winter. Al-Jazari made a considerable engineering effort ensuring that there would be twelve hours between sunrise and sunset in summer and winter. This is the purpose of the flow regulator which adjust a short hour in the winter compared to the longer hour in the summertime. Time is not an illusion or a pure man-made concept. The Earth orbited the sun before there were humans around and the sunrise and the sunset, as well as summer and winter, were here before we gave them their name. But the perception of time and its measurement are human inventions. If I would have met al-Jazari and told him that a second that was impossible to measure in his time is the basic unit of time and its scientific definition is approximately 9 billion (for those who want precision 9,192,631,770) cyclic switching between two energy levels of the atom cesium. Not only would that he would not understand a word but also would think me really He did not need such precision that did not fit his daily experience. But I use Waze, a navigation application, and we need accurate atomic clocks at this level of precision to bring me to my destination on time. In today world, the concept of time which varies according to the seasons seems far-fetched, but in the world of al-Jazari who knew sundials and water clocks, it made perfect sense.
• Thirdly al-Jazari made detailed measurements of the water regulator attributed to Archimedes and found it insufficient. Then he explains in detail how he tries to solve the problem without success through trial and error. It’s ridiculous to compare a modern engineer to al-Jazari, but it is delightful to read the report of a very talented engineer more than eight hundred years ago. It turns out that his concerns are not very different from the concerns of a current engineer. From the text, it turns out he did a “literature review” and theoretical calculations (in this case unsuccessful), and plan and perform the experiments. He was also a skilled man who knows copper, bronze and wood and their processing. When al-Jazari explains, for example, how to prepare the main water reservoir, he’s not satisfied with a drawing and selecting material (copper) but explains how to get a perfect cylinder with a precise wooden disk and how to ensure that the cylinder would have the same diameter all along. For the technical reader, it is easy to sympathize with the difficulties and solutions. There is something appealing in this combination of a man of the books, an engineer, a craft master and an artist who we can meet through the pages and the hundreds of years that passed.