A crankshaft is a rotating shaft carrying one or more offset crankpins that convert the reciprocating, back-and-forth motion of pistons, delivered through connecting rods, into rotary motion, or run the same conversion the other way to turn rotation into a push-pull stroke. The earliest known step toward the mechanism appears in Baghdad in the ninth century, where the three Banu Musa brothers described automated crank devices in their Book of Ingenious Devices, a design that could not yet complete a full rotation but needed only a small modification to become a true crankshaft. The Artuqid engineer Ismail al-Jazari, who lived from 1136 to 1206, described an actual crank-and-connecting-rod system built into two of his water-raising machines, giving the crankshaft one of its earliest confirmed working forms centuries before it became standard equipment in the reciprocating steam and internal combustion engines of later ages.
Facts
SignificanceAl-Jazari's crankshaft converted continuous rotary motion into linear reciprocating motion and is described as central to later machinery including the steam engine, the internal combustion engine and automatic controls. 1 Connections
In Field
Source Ismail al-Jazari - Wikipedia
Sources
1. Ismail al-Jazari - Wikipedia
Crankshaft and crank-slider mechanism section
In 1206, al-Jazari invented an early crankshaft, which he incorporated with a crank-connecting rod mechanism in his twin-cylinder pump.
Crankshaft and crank-slider mechanism section, significance sentence
The crankshaft described by al-Jazari transforms continuous rotary motion into a linear reciprocating motion, and is central to modern machinery such as the steam engine, internal combustion engine and automatic controls.
In Field: Mechanical Engineering, Categories
Engineers of the medieval Islamic world
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