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Elephant Clock
- Fifer82 8y agoI found a video about it, pretty cool. http://www.1001inventions.com/media/video/clock http://www.1001inventions.com/media/video/clock
- mito2 8y agoHere’s a detailed animation of how the Elephant Clock works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCW_wp0dgF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCW_wp0dgF4
- nicheasta 8y agoAnd how is the disk at the top rotated? I'm talking about the one that shows the number of hours since the sunrise.
- smudgymcscmudge 8y agoI was wondering the same thing. The wikipedia article discusses it a bit under the heading “passage of temporal hours”, but I couldn’t visualize it. I was hoping the video would clarify that.
- cicero 8y agoIt appears that the dropping ball does something to advance it.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoAl-Jazari's knowledge seems to have ultimately derived from a Baghdad library, via the Banu Musa brothers. I find the history of those libraries fascinating https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom. Kinda OT. Apparently he was a Yazidi Kurd; that's what the circumstantial evidence shows, and there's no other evidence AFAICT. It says "Muslim engineer", which would be like saying Steve Jobs was a "Christian Engineer".
- Jedd 8y ago> It says "Muslim engineer", which would be like saying Steve Jobs was a "Christian Engineer". I note that Ismail al-Jazari's wikipedia article [1] describes him as muslim, and also an engineer -- which appellation are you concerned about here? I'm unsure how that compares to describing Steve Jobs as either christian or an engineer, though I'd be struggling to try to substantiate either descriptor. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_al-Jazari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_al-Jazari
- smudgymcscmudge 8y agoSteve Jobs was a cultural engineer.
- Jedd 8y ago> Steve Jobs was a cultural engineer. You mean like P. T. Barnum?
- nf05papsjfVbc 8y agoSlightly off-topic but if the "history of science" is a subject that interests, I can recommend "The Cambridge Illustrated History of Science". It's an expensive book but I was able to borrow a copy from a library near where I live and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoI'm a crap history student, but wasn't this during a time when a central Caliphate ruled over most Muslims? It might be more accurate to say that calling him a "Muslim engineer" is like calling Steve Jobs a "Western engineer". Specifying a particular region he was from might be like calling Jobs a "California engineer".
- RickJWagner 8y agoCool article. My thanks to whoever posted it.
- captfindus 8y agowas worried as i misread the title
- djsumdog 8y agoIf you are into horology, an interest podcast to listen to is S-Town. It's about a amateur horologist who lived in a shit-town. He made a lot of money restoring clocks.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoWhy was it a shit-town?
- grzm 8y agohttps://stownpodcast.org/about https://stownpodcast.org/about > "Brian, a longtime This American Life producer, started reporting this story more than three years ago, when he got an email from John with the subject line “John B McLemore lives in Shittown Alabama.”" You can listen to the podcast which includes John McLemore himself and why he described it so.