Discoveries that changed the world | hours

People knew that time could not be stopped, and that it was important to know it and use it well. That is why people have worked hard since ancient times to invent tools for measuring time and calendar, which developed into clocks, and before clocks appeared in their current form, ancient civilizations used different ways to know time, such as: Dependence on celestial bodies, water and other materials, so use sundials, water clocks, hourglass clocks, candle clocks, incense watches, mechanical watches with gears and scales, and astronomical clocks.

And Muslims in particular needed to know the times of prayer and raising the call to prayer, the times of fasting, festivals and Hajj, so they had a major role in the invention of the hourglass and the water clock, as it started in the past with the simple water clock that was used in Egypt before the year 1500 BC. Which consists of a cylindrical bowl graduated with sections that measure the amount of water coming down from a small gutter at the bottom.

As for the complex water clocks, its story began in the thirteenth century, with a genius man named Ismail bin Razzaz al-Jazari, from Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey, who was a pious Muslim and a brilliant engineer, and by 1206 A.D. Al-Jazari had designed and manufactured many watches of various shapes and sizes. He wrote a book on mechanical engineering entitled “The Combining Science and Useful Work in the Making of Tricks,” in which he described fifty automatic devices distributed into six categories, including water clocks.

It is also attributed to the scientist Abbas Ibn Firnas who invented a clock to measure time and prayer times in particular, and it was called the Miqana, as it had a circular shape divided into equal parts, and the angles indicated minutes and seconds, and the timetable worked by measuring the shadow and its angles and degrees.

The legendary elephant clock was one of al-Jazari’s innovations. At the end of the twelfth century AD, al-Jazari made this complex clock, and collected signs and shapes that express the diversity of human civilizations, to show the nature of the universality of Islam, which at its time extended from Spain to Central Asia, and the elephant’s clock was a clock. Water in the form of a huge elephant, topped by a small house, and the elephant is led by robots, and there are a dragon and a phoenix, and this clock incorporated in its design the civilizations of the ancient world; Where the elephant represents the Indian civilization, the dragon represents the Asian civilization, the phoenix represents the ancient Egyptian civilization, a robot with a turban (a symbol of Arab-Islamic civilization), and a Persian carpet. Al-Jazari uses the weights and mechanical chain transmission technology on this watch.

At the beginning of the twelfth century, Muslim astronomers developed the astronomical clock and the sundial and used it in mosques, and among the most famous of those who contributed to the process of its development, Ibn al-Shater and Abu al-Rayhan al-Biruni, the old clock indicators had longitudinal hour lines, so the hours estimated by them were not equal, and they changed according to The seasons, so that the day is divided into 12 parts regardless of whether it is at any time of the year it is, so the hours were less in the winter and larger in the summer. Clocks of equal length were the invention of Ibn al-Shater in 1371, which was based on advances made by al-Battani in trigonometry.

Ibn Al-Shater realized that "when using a sundial hand parallel to the Earth's axis, he will have a sundial that shows the values of constant hours throughout the year." The Ibn al-Shater clock is the oldest polar axis clock, and this concept was transferred to the West in 1446.

In the field of mechanical clocks, the Ottoman engineer, Taqi al-Din al-Shami, described a clock with a balance clock with a rod and trajectory gears and a alarm that moves under the influence of weight and illustrates the phases of the moon in his book The Planets of the Earth in the Position of Periodic Banks, which he wrote around the year 1556. The alarm was determined by placing a wedge in the indicator wheel at The specified time. His watch had three pointers indicating hours, minutes, and seconds. After that, Taqi al-Din al-Shami established a clock for his observatory in Istanbul, which was an important innovation in the sixteenth century in applied astronomy, since until the twentieth century, clocks were not accurate enough to be used for astronomical purposes. In 1702, the Ottoman watchmaker, Mishur Shah Didi, made a watch that estimated minutes.