Here’s a detailed animation of how the Elephant Clock works.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCW_wp0dgF4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCW_wp0dgF4</a>
Al-Jazari's knowledge seems to have ultimately derived from a Baghdad library, via the Banu Musa brothers.<p>I find the history of those libraries fascinating <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom</a>.<p>Kinda OT.<p>Apparently he was a Yazidi Kurd; that's what the circumstantial evidence shows, and there's no other evidence AFAICT.<p>It says "Muslim engineer", which would be like saying Steve Jobs was a "Christian Engineer".
I found a video about it, pretty cool.
<a href="http://www.1001inventions.com/media/video/clock" rel="nofollow">http://www.1001inventions.com/media/video/clock</a>
If you are into horology, an interest podcast to listen to is S-Town. It's about a amateur horologist who lived in a shit-town. He made a lot of money restoring clocks.