Scientists and engineers of the Islamic world

This lesson asks you to describe the contributions of scientists, among them Canadians, to the fields you are studying. The museum offers one person of the Islamic world, an engineer, described in a single reference work; the Canadian scientists and the contributions closest to your own course are for your class to bring. ¹

A contribution can be a book, a device, a method or a question. For each person you meet, ask what they added, who says so, and what the record does not claim for them.

Look at one machine from al-Jazari's book, the elephant clock. The Met's catalogue describes the rider and the bird moving, a ball passing to a dragon and then to a vessel and gong every half hour, and the counting of balls to find how much time has passed ². Ask what each moving part is for, and what is being counted.

The records hold no sentence in which al-Jazari says why he built his machines. They show where he stood. TDV places him in a tradition running from Hellenistic engineering to the Banu Musa, and describes an engineer improving earlier work ³. About the double-piston pump, TDV judges water-raising machines economically more important than elaborate clocks, although the book gives them less space ³.

It is easy to read a book of machines as a list of inventions. TDV describes an engineer improving earlier work, not the inventor of every underlying principle in his book ³. For the animal-powered scoop lifter, the sources support his authorship and engineering context, not a claim that he built the device or originated every component ^{4 5}.

The picture of the elephant clock is a copy. Met folio 57.51.23 preserves the image in a copy by Farrukh ibn Abd al-Latif, dated 715/1315, probably produced in Syria or Iraq ⁶. The record says the copy is not an original working machine ². So the page shows how the book travelled and was illustrated.

TDV describes al-Jazari as an engineer improving earlier work. Would you count improving a machine as a contribution to science, and what is your reason?

• Al-Jazari: his work and his patron, as the records give them.
• The elephant clock: the machine on the Met's folio.
• The double-piston pump: a machine of his water-raising division.

Read about al-Jazari. Write one sentence on what he contributed and one on something the record takes care not to claim for him; then add one scientist from your class's list.