Talk:Su Song

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華

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[edit] Are You Kidding Me?

I've read Ricardo's article a while back (which is rather good), and I do not recall any mentioning of how Su Song's astronomical clock tower lacked an escapement mechanism (I do however remember his long dissertation on wet and dry compasses). In fact, if he did propose the tower lacked an escapement mechanism, he would be gravely mistaken, proposing an incredibly outdated belief and misunderstanding of Chinese history (refer to Jesuits of the 16th century in China). In a more recent work than 500-year-old Jesuit speculation on Chinese clockworks, Joseph Needham of the 21st century provides a more accurate and updated view of pre-Ming era clockwork, including use of the escapement mechanism in Su Song's clock-tower.

Taken from Joseph's Science and Civilization in China: Volume 4, Part II...

(Su Song's) clockwork, driven by a water-wheel, and fully enclosed within the tower, rotated an observational armillary sphere on the top platform and a celestial globe in the upper story. Its time-announcing function was further fulfilled visually and audibly by the performances of numerous jacks mounted on the eight superimposed wheels of a time-keeping shaft and appearing at windows in the pagoda-like structure at the front of the tower. Within the building, some 40 ft. high, the driving-wheel was provided with a special form of escapement, and the water was pumped back into the tanks periodically by manual means. The time-annunciator must have included conversion gearing, since it gave 'unequal' as well as equal time signals, and the sphere probably had this. Su Sung's treatise on the clock, the Hsin I Hsiang Fa Yao, constitutes a classic of horological engineering (Needham, 449).

That was figure Fig. 650, while Fig. 656 displays the upper and lower norias with their tanks and the manual wheel for operating them.

Fig. 657 displays the a more miniature and scaled-down pic for the basics of the escapement mechanism in an illustration (from Su's book), with Needham's caption here in this quote: "The 'celestial balance' (thien heng) or escapement mechanism of Su Sung's clockwork (Hsin I Hsiang Fa Yao, ch. 3, p. 18b)," (Needham, 458). The latter figure carefully labels (letter order arrangement being my own input):

A) a right upper lock B) upper link C) left upper lock D) axle or pivot E) long chain F) upper counterweight G) sump H) checking fork of the lower balancing lever I) coupling tongue J) main (ie. lower) counterweight (Needham, 458).

Figure 658. displays a more intricate and most-telling half-page scale drawing of Su Song's large escapement mechanism, labeling these individual parts as they interact with one another (in numeric order):

1. arrested spoke (fu) 2. left upper lock (tso thien so) 3. scoop (shou shui hu) being filled by 4. water jet from constant-level tank 5. small counterweight 6. checking fork (ko chha) tripped by a projection pin on the scoop, and forming the near end of 7. the lower balancing lever (shu heng) with 8. its lower counterweight (shu chhuan) 9. coupling tongue (kuan she), connected by 10. the long chain (thien thiao) with 11. the upper balancing lever (thien heng), which has at its far end 12. the upper counterweight (thien kuan), and at its near end 13. a short length chain (thien kuan) connecting it with the upper lock beneath it; 14. right upper lock (yu thien so) considered as the left in our analysis. (Needham, 460)

There is plenty of info on this from Needham's work if you want me to show more.

I rest my case for now.

--PericlesofAthens 03:30, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Stub Status

I have greatly expanded this article, and I do not consider it a stub any longer. I would like to get feedback from others, but for now I have removed it from stub status.

--PericlesofAthens 05:32, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

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