The Turkey of an Engineer’s Dream

Throughout his life, Durmus Caliskan, one of Turkey’s most successful engineers and the inspiration for our company, dreamed of a Turkey that contributed to the common heritage of humanity in the fields of science, technology, art, and culture. His professional work and perseverance contributed greatly to Turkey’s development and to the rise of engineering as a source of inspiration to young people. Durmus Caliskan’s top priority was education, and he always strived to push the people around him to get a good education and to develop themselves. He dreamed of a society based on mutual understanding and tolerance. He dreamed of a Turkey where people used their creativity to contribute to the future of the world in a free-thinking scientific and cultural environment, and he worked tirelessly to make his dream a reality. The Durmus Caliskan Foundation continues to work to realize the dream of this great engineer.

Durmus Caliskan was born in 1950 in the village of Paynik (Erikdibi) in the Turkish province of Bayburt. After his outstanding success in primary school caught the attention of his teacher, he moved to Istanbul with his family to pursue his secondary education. Because of his interest in engineering, he studied technical painting at the Sultanahmet Art School. After high school, he entered the mechanical engineering department of Yildiz Technical University with top marks. Durmus Caliskan developed and manufactured machines throughout his professional life. He was one of the first to bring important industrial equipment, including shipyard machines, cranes, and marble-cutting machines, to Turkey, and did so using his own original designs. Throughout his life, he was closely involved with the community and supported it by encouraging many people to pursue an education. From his retirement from business life in 1998 until his death in 2018, he devoted himself to social activities, youth education, and especially his work on Jazari.

Durmus Caliskan was the foremost scholar of Ismail al-Jazari, the chief engineer of the Artuqid state in the 1200s, and his great work, The Book of Knowledge. Prior to Caliskan’s work on Jazari, only a few of the great engineer’s machines had been examined; and even then, they were largely misunderstood. Caliskan, thinking just as Jazari would have, deciphered all of Jazari’s machines and drew up modern projects so that they could be reproduced today according to the same mechanical principles Jazari used. The engineer Atilla Bir, a famous historian of science, described Caliskan as a “modern Jazari.” This is because while working to unravel Jazari’s machines, Caliskan would practically enter Jazari’s mind; he would even dream about him. Jazari was a great inspiration for Durmus Caliskan in his work to instill both self-confidence and a solid educational foundation in young minds in the fields of engineering and mechanics; and through this work, Caliskan helped carry Jazari’s colorful world to the present day.

Based on the importance that Durmus Caliskan attached to young people’s education, we established the Durmus Caliskan Foundation to keep his memory alive and share the inspiration we received from him with society. Our foundation supports education in order to promote Turkey’s scientific advancement through the principles of science and rationality that Durmus Caliskan so esteemed. We offer merit scholarships to idealistic high-school, undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students to help nurture the “Jazaris” of the future and to encourage them to persevere in their work. Another branch of the Durmus Caliskan Foundation’s support in the field of education is its library support. The foundation ensures that schools, student dormitories, and libraries in Turkey that have difficulty creating a library collection are provided the books they need.

The importance of Jazari in terms of mechanical history is an indisputable fact. However, another characteristic that makes his legacy important to us is that he presents a story about general science and particularly mechanics, that relates to us and that we can tell our children to make learning enjoyable for them. There is no doubt that science is the owned by all of humanity and Jazari is a scientist who has made significant contributions to this heritage. In this context, the fact that an impressive story that contributes to the common ideal of humanity belongs to our history, allows us to raise children as self-confident individuals possessing this ideal. To learn the basic principles of mechanics directly through Jazari’s machines, and to gain a more effective and more concrete mental space combined with a historical story on the transfer of scientific knowledge, ‘Jazari’s Extraordinary Machines -Jazari For Everyone’ will be available to you at all select book stores and book sales websites.

The book Jazari’s Extraordinary Machines: Jazari For Everyone, has been prepared befitting to the genius of the great inventor and reveals the texts he wrote and the technical drawings he drew in a colorful, fairy tale-like language, so that his engineering and philosophy could not only be understood by engineers but by everyone, all thanks to the 15 years of meticulous work by Durmus Caliskan.

Over 15 years, Durmus Caliskan, translated Jazari’s texts into Turkish that can be understood by today’s engineers and even by those in unrelated fields, based on the small number of measurements given by Jazari and using calculations, he obtained the quantities of all the instruments, using modern techniques he drew up technical drawings and projects to assemble all of the instruments, he wrote detailed notes for areas of the text and machines which were in need of explanation, and found and omitted the mistakes that had been made previously in the texts and machines particularly in Hill’s work. This book on Jazari’s machines, which everyone had had a hand in since the early 1900s, was published as of 2015 left no stone unturned. It consists of texts and technical drawings by Durmus Caliskan so that not only engineers but everyone can understand Jazari. In the book Jazari For Everyone, the technical drawings drawn by Durmus Caliskan are modeled in 3-D and Jazari’s machines are grouped with a methodology appropriate to the present day rather than according to the categories in Kitab-ul Hiyal. There is a general introduction text at the beginning of each chapter and this introduction text holds importance to the machine group both in terms of the period and Jazari. On the inside pages where the machines are introduced, first, general drawings of the appearance for each machine are found and the Hagia Sophia copy of Jazari’s Kitab-ul Hiyal was used for these original miniatures and the missing ones were completed from the other copies. Following the original miniatures are short texts outlining the function of the instruments and how they work.

The importance of Jazari in terms of mechanical history is an indisputable fact. However, another characteristic that makes his legacy important to us is that he presents a story about general science and particularly mechanics, that relates to us and that we can tell our children to make learning enjoyable for them. There is no doubt that science is the owned by all of humanity and Jazari is a scientist who has made significant contributions to this heritage. In this context, the fact that an impressive story that contributes to the common ideal of humanity belongs to our history, allows us to raise children as self-confident individuals possessing this ideal. To learn the basic principles of mechanics directly through Jazari’s machines, and to gain a more effective and more concrete mental space combined with a historical story on the transfer of scientific knowledge, ‘Jazari’s Extraordinary Machines -Jazari For Everyone’ will be available to you at all select book stores and book sales websites.