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Al-Jazari

Original nameAl-Jazari

Medieval Islamic Engineer, Designer of Automatic Machines Hailed as the "Father of Robotics"

The Names Remembered · Small Roles, Famous Names

Automatic Mechanical DevicesThe Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical DevicesThe Early Application of the Crankshaft and Cam Mechanism

Who they are

Al-Jazari (c. 1136–1206) was an Islamic engineer active from the late twelfth to early thirteenth century, serving the court of the Artuqid dynasty in the Anatolia region, who in 1206 completed the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, recording and illustrating in detail about fifty mechanical devices he designed and built, covering automatic water clocks, banquet-serving automaton figures that could automatically serve dishes and pour drinks, automatic water-supply systems that could dispense a precisely measured amount of water, and one of the earliest actually applied examples of the crankshaft and cam linkage mechanism in history, as modern history of machinery holds. The devices he designed commonly used float valves, gear linkage, cam control, and other, for the time, exceedingly precise and complex mechanical principles, and the idea in some designs of "automatically executing a series of actions in turn by a preset program" is broadly seen by modern mechanical-engineering history as one of the earliest actual engineering practices of the idea of the "programmable automatic machine," so that al-Jazari is often hailed as the "father of robotics." The precise design drawings and detailed manufacturing instructions he recorded are the most important and most complete first-hand historical documents for the study of the mechanical-engineering achievements of the medieval Islamic golden age.

Primary sourcesAl-Jazari, Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (1206)

Key stories

The Mechanical Servant That Poured Drinks Automatically

Among the many ingenious devices al-Jazari designed, the most marvelous was a series of humanoid mechanical devices that could automatically complete a string of banquet-serving actions such as pouring water and handing a towel by a preset mechanical program, the devices internally, through precise float valves and gear linkage, able to complete multiple continuous steps automatically in a fixed order — this design idea of "automatically executing a series of actions by a preset program" was, in the mechanical engineering of the time, a strikingly forward-looking feat.

The Earliest Evidence of the Crankshaft Mechanism

In a mechanical device for pumping water for irrigation recorded in his book, al-Jazari used a crankshaft linkage mechanism converting rotary motion into reciprocating linear motion, and modern history of mechanical engineering broadly holds this to be one of the earliest actual engineering applications in recorded human history of the crankshaft — the principle later widely used as a core transmission part of countless machines such as the steam engine and internal-combustion engine — fully displaying the precise complexity mechanical engineering reached in the medieval Islamic golden age.

Relationships

Mentor

⚙️Hero of Alexandria　Al-Jazari’s automatic-machine designs carried on and developed the tradition of automaton design Hero had begun more than a thousand years before

Echoes today

Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.

The title "father of robotics"Al-Jazari, for the pioneering contribution of his automatic-machine designs, is often acknowledged by modern mechanical-engineering history as one of the "fathers of robotics," a title also often mentioned together with the ancient Greek Hero.

Appears in

The Technological Seeds of Antiquity and the Middle AgesAl-Jazari’s Automata and the Crankshaft Mechanism

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