Book of Ingenious Devices

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson  · 15 Nov 2016  · 322pp  · 88,197 words

their own designs, showcasing the advances in mechanics and hydraulics that surrounded them in Baghdad’s flourishing intellectual culture. The work they eventually published, The Book of Ingenious Devices, now reads like a prophesy of future engineering tools: crankshafts, twin-cylinder pumps with suction, conical valves employed as “in-line” components—mechanical parts centuries

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age, enabling everything from assembly-line robots to thermostats to steam engines to the control of jet airplanes. Pages from the Banu Musa’s The Book of Ingenious Devices These two books of “ingenious” machines deserve a prominent place in the canon of engineering history, in part as a corrective to the too-frequent

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. — The Banu Musa—those brilliant toy designers from the Islamic golden age—earned a permanent place in the pantheon of engineering and robotics with their Book of Ingenious Devices. And yet the brothers omitted from that collection what may have been their most ingenious device of all, a machine that would introduce one of

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–37 bodily humors, 134–35 bone flutes, 65–70, 66 Le Bon Marché, 41–46, 45 Book of Games of Chance, The (Cardano), 205, 207 Book of Ingenious Devices, The (Banu Masu), 3–5, 4, 73 Book of the Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanisms, The (al-Jazari), 2, 3–5 Boorstin, Daniel, 183 Boucicaut, Aristide

The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History in Seven Cities

by Violet Moller  · 21 Feb 2019

of course there was no way they could know for sure. 10. The Banu Musas’ diagram of the self-trimming lamp they invented, from their Book of Ingenious Devices. This exploit gives us a clear idea of the atmosphere in ninth-century Baghdad. The Banu Musa brothers and their peers gave free rein to

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bureaucracy and vastly more than those of an ordinary craftsman or soldier.’15 The brothers also wrote their own works; the most celebrated was the Book of Ingenious Devices – a collection of one hundred mechanical inventions or adaptations, some frivolous and some utilitarian, including a windproof torch, a flute that plays itself, a spill

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today. The ‘Room of the Tree’ so marvelled at by the Byzantine ambassadors was certainly based on technology originally designed by the Banu Musa. The Book of Ingenious Devices was widely read across the Arab world and their ideas would travel to Muslim Spain and, from there, translated into Latin, into Western Europe. One

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postal service ref1 site ref1, ref2 trade networks ref1 translation ref1, ref2 Bakhtishu family ref1 Banu Hud family ref1 Banu Musa brothers ref1, ref2, ref3 Book of Ingenious Devices ref1, ref2 Barbaro, Ermolao ref1 Barbaro family ref1, ref2 Barmak, Jafar ibn ref1n Barmak, Khalid ibn ref1, ref2, ref3 Barmakid family ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science

by Jim Al-Khalili  · 28 Sep 2010  · 467pp  · 114,570 words

charge of canal projects to provide water for the still growing cities of Baghdad and Sāmarra to its north. Most famous of all was their Book of Ingenious Devices (Kitab al-Hiyāl), published in 850. This was a large illustrated work on mechanical devices that included automata, puzzles and magic tricks as well as

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Ibrahim al-Istakhri, showing Iraq, the Tigris river, Kufa, Baghdad and Persian Gulf. 26. The Banū Mūsa brothers’ self-trimming lamp, as described in their Book of Ingenious Devices. 27. The famous Elephant Clock of al-Jazari. 28. The inner workings of the Elephant Clock. 29. Diagram of a system for pumping water into

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Siege of 12 Bakhshali Manuscript 96–7 al-Balkhi, Abū Ma’shar (Albumasar) 212 al-Balkhi, mapmaker 89 Banū Mūsa brothers 73–4, 77, 82 Book of Ingenious Devices 74 persecution of al-Kindi 135 Barmaki family 5, 6, 10, 46 al-Barmaki, Ja’far 7–8, 46 execution 10, 53, 254n8 al-Battāni