The Third Dimension

Muslim clocks were some of the most ingenious ever created. One extraordinary reproduction in Sezgin’s museum, modeled after an original timepiece from 13th-century Toledo, has hands that move as mercury shifts from compartment to compartment around a wheel. The steadily moving weight of the mercury rotates the wheel through a complete cycle in 24 hours. In addition to showing the hours and sounding them with bells, the clock face represents an astrolabe that indicates the position of the sun and stars. More than three centuries later, in 1598, Attila Parisio, an unscrupulous Venetian watchmaker, wrote a book claiming that he had invented the device. And in 1656, the Campani brothers presented a similar clock to Pope Alexander vii, no doubt omitting to mention its Muslim origins.

Elsewhere in the museum is a delicately incised 12th-century brass balance with a miniature bowl at one end that drips water with such precise regularity that the counterweight at the other end tracks time in minutes. “This was unheard of in the history of science,” marvels Sezgin. “The Greeks could mark time in 15-minute intervals, but no one before had managed to divide it into minutes.”

Amid cases holding pear-shaped alembic jars and a cylindrical brass tower sprout-ing glass retorts with long curved necks, used to distill rosewater, is a 1.5-meter- tall (5') still with coiled pipe running through cold-water basins. It is a reproduction of a 16th-century German apparatus that was modeled after a design by the 10th-century Andalusian doctor Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi (known as Abulcasis in the West).

Anticipating Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine by more than 600 years, the Córdoban polymath Abbas ibn Firnas concocted a rudimentary glider in the ninth century that is represented in the museum with leather straps and cloth wings. Looking more like a contemporary hang-glider than Leonardo da Vinci’s design, whose weight kept him Earth-bound, Ibn Firnas’s glider managed to stay aloft for a few meters, Sezgin assures me, though its 70-year-old designer later died of back injuries suffered during his crash landing.