Friday, June 26, 2009

The first pump was invented in the beginning of XIII century

The first pump invented was a suction pump, created in 1206 by the Arabic engineer and inventor, Abū al-'Iz Ibn Ismā'īl ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī (1136 – 1206) a prominent Arab polymath: a scholar, inventor, mechanical engineer, craftsman, artist and astronomer from Al-Jazira, Mesopotamia who lived during the Islamic Golden Age. Known as the “Arabic Leonard de Vinci” he is also famous for having written the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices in 1206, where he described fifty mechanical devices along with instructions on how to construct them.



In 1206, Al-Jazari described the first suction pipes, suction pump, double-action pump, valve, and crank-connecting rod mechanism, when he invented a twin-cylinder reciprocating piston suction pump. This pump is driven by a water wheel, which drives, through a system of gears, an oscillating slot-rod to which the rods of two pistons are attached. The pistons work in horizontally opposed cylinders, each provided with valve-operated suction and delivery pipes. The delivery pipes are joined above the centre of the machine to form a single outlet into the irrigation system. This may be the only one of al-Jazari's water-raising machines which had a direct significance for the development of modern engineering. This pump is remarkable for three reasons:
• The first known use of a true suction pipe (which sucks fluids into a partial vacuum) in a pump.
• The first application of the double-acting principle.
• The conversion of rotary to reciprocating motion, via the crank-connecting rod mechanism.
Al-Jazari's suction piston pump could lift 13.6 metres of water, with the help of delivery pipes. This was more advanced than the suction pumps that appeared in 15th-century Europe, which lacked delivery pipes. It was not, however, any more efficient than a noria (a machine for lifting water into a small aqueduct, either for the purpose of irrigation or to feed seawater into a saltern) commonly used by the Muslim world at the time.
The suction pump later appeared in Europe from the 15th century. Taqi al-Din's six-cylinder 'Monobloc' pump, invented in 1551, could also create a partial vacuum, which was formed "as the lead weight moves upwards, it pulls the piston with it, creating vacuum which sucks the water through a non return clack valve into the piston cylinder."

If you want to see the mechanism of al –Jazari’s pump, go to
http://dmmf.mec.uniroma2.it/Sito%20Meccanismi/Filmati/Assieme_Pompa.m1v
http://dmmf.mec.uniroma2.it/Sito%20Meccanismi/Filmati/Particolare_Pompa.m1v

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