the meaning of JAZARI2u
800 Years Later: In Memory of Al-Jazari, A Genius Mechanical Engineer
Al-Jazari's life and environment
Al-Jazari(1136-1206) was an important Arab Muslim scholar. He was an inventor and mechanical engineer who gained fame and glory with his famous book of mechanics, Al-Jami `bayn al-`ilm wa 'l-`amal al-nafi `fi sina `at al-hiyal (A Compendium on the Theory and Useful Practice of the Mechanical Arts), the most significant treatise of the Islamic tradition of mechanical engineering and a ground breaking work in the history of technology. Some 800 years after his death, modern history of science is appealed to give him credit and celebrate his work.
Al-Jazari's greatest treatise has always aroused great interest from historians of technology and historians of art. Indeed, alongside his accomplishments as an inventor and engineer, al-Jazari was also an accomplished artist. The surviving manuscripts of his book provide detailed instructions for all of his inventions and illustrate them using miniature paintings, a medieval style of Islamic art, to make it possible for a reader to reconstruct his inventions.
To have an idea of the innovative work of al-Jazariin the history of technology, we quote this sentence from the historian Lynn White who writes: "Segmental gears first clearly appear in al-Jazari, in the West they emerge in Giovanni de Dondi's astronomical clock finished in 1364, and only with the great Sienese engineer Francesco di Giorgio (1501) did they enter the general vocabulary of European machine design [1]."
Donald R. Hill, the English historian who was an academic authority in the history of Islamic mechanics and engineering, wrote in Studies in Medieval Islamic Technology: "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… Al-Jazaridid not only assimilate the techniques of his non-Arab and Arab predecessors, he was also creative. He added several mechanical and hydraulic devices. The impact of these inventions can be seen in the later designing of steam engines and internal combustion engines, paving the way for automatic control and other modern machinery. The impact of al-Jazari's inventions is still felt in modern contemporary mechanical engineering [2]."
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