Engineering · a Light

His famous crank turns up on a Roman relief

Al-Jazari, chief engineer to the Artuqid court at Diyarbakir, finished his book of mechanical devices in 1206 with instructions detailed enough to build from, and wrote that he described nothing he had not made himself. Historians of technology long credited him with the earliest known crank and connecting rod, the linkage in his twin cylinder pump that turns rotation into a push and a pull. Then a carved relief from Hierapolis, in what is now Turkey, studied and published in the 2000s, showed a water powered stone saw using the same linkage in the third century of the common era. The credit for the mechanism moves back. What does not move is the book: the earliest surviving set of engineering drawings that explains segmental gears, cams and valves well enough for somebody else to copy.

Al-Jazari · Diyarbakir, 1206 CE