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Islamic Scientists
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A very important device by which the world runs is the clock. For centuries people have used the stars and the moon and the sun to
chart the course of the day as well as the night. Early Greeks developed a device known as the water clock to monitor the
hours of the night. This worked by carefully watching the regulated flow of water into, or out of, a bowl marked with lines
that corresponded with the hour. The obvious problem with this is that it was not accurate and lacked a fixed time for
everyone's clock. It is thought that this archaic method of tracking the hours of the day was the sole option until the
fourteenth century when engineers erected a mechanical, weight-driven clock in Milan, Italy. The origin of the advancement
of the clock (that is to say the addition of gears) began in the 11th century with a combination of the water clock and a
minimal number of gears, which functioned to better regulate the flow of water. However, it is Ibn Firnas who is given the
real credit for the first
truly mechanical clock. Firnas was an engineer in Florence for a large portion of his life until he moved to Spain to study
music theory, which was then a branch of mathematics. He then turned his interest to building a model of the universe
complete with revolving planets and the sun. This introduced him to the world of mechanics. A known scholar, Firnas
devoted his time to documenting his findings and illustrating all of his innovation so that others could learn and build
upon them. Islamic books full of Firnas's designs demonstrate the complexities of epicycle gears and segmental gears in a
way that no one could really understand. One of his sketches even calls for a mercury escapement likened to that of the
water clock, but more accurate in its measurement. Europeans blatantly copied his ideas, taking advantage of his knowledge
by claiming it as their own. These clocks were so accurate that Muslim astronomers used them in their observatories.
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