Bandit sons who built 9th century robots

0:00You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're in a podcast, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Or your new podcast for free today at RSS.com. Imagine making a mathematical error at your job. And your boss comes up to you and tells you that if you don't find a way to fix it, you are going to be crucified. Right. Literally crucified on the job site. Not fired, not, you know, demoted, you're crucified. It's intense. Yeah, welcome to today's deep dive. We are traveling back to the Islamic Golden Age in a 9th century Baghdad. Right. And we're going to explore the brilliant minds, the unprecedented inventions and the truly

1:01perilous workplace environment of the Vandana Musa brothers. It is a story that honestly, it forces us to completely rethink how scientific progress actually happens. Absolutely. Because we tend to picture the history of science as this like orderly civilized march forward in pristine laboratories, you know. The reality here is scorching deserts, cut for a palace intrigue and literal highway robbery. Okay. Let's unpack this. Today, we are pulling from a comprehensive Wikipedia article detailing the biographical timeline of these three brothers, Muammad, Amad, and also on the bun. Exactly. We're going to look at their surviving texts and how they managed to bridge ancient Greek theoretical math with like hand on physical engineering. They essentially built what might be the world's first programmable machine, which is just mind blowing for the 9th century. Right. But to understand how they achieved any of this, you really have to look at their origin story because their father, Musa Ibn Shakir, was a bandit. He started his career as a high women in Coruscant, just, you know, robbing travelers, which

2:05is an incredibly rare starting point for a family of legendary polymaths. I mean, yeah. You don't have the exact historical record of how he managed this pivot. But somehow this highway robber puts down his sword, studies the stars, and becomes a recognized astronomer. That's why. And more importantly, he manages to befriend a man who would eventually become the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mamoon. And that friendship is the catalyst for everything because when the father dies, his three sons are left orphaned. But the caliph remembers his friend. He steps in, takes these three boys under his wing, assigns a senior Baghdad official as their guardian, and enrolls them in the House of Wisdom. The intellectual center of the world at that time. Yeah. I'm trying to think of a modern equivalent for you listening. And the closest thing would be if a superpower government scooped up three Orkin kids and just dropped them into a top secret elite tech incubator with an unlimited black budget. That's a great way to put it.

3:05Right. You were handed every conceivable resource and trained by senior court astrologers in geometry, mechanics, music, and mathematics. Well, if we connect this to the bigger picture, you have to understand the environment they were dropped into. The Abbasid Caliphate at this time was completely obsessed with acquiring knowledge. Right. The translation movement. Exactly. This was the peak of the great translation movement. The state's primary goal was to gather ancient Greek texts from Byzantium, you know, books of philosophy, mathematics, engineering, and translate them into Arabic. And the Bunyamusa brothers didn't just sit in a classroom reading these texts. As they grew older and acquired immense state-sponsored wealth, they became major power players in this movement. Yeah. The sources say they were personally paying translators 500 dinars a month, which is a staggering fortune. To put that in perspective, yeah, it was massive. Yeah. They were funding these massive expeditions just to hunt down ancient manuscripts. So totally. And traveled to Byzantium themselves to find these books. And what stands out to me is their eye for raw, unconventional talent.

4:10Yes. The Thabit-Dibbincora story. Exactly. This is one specific story where the Elvis brother Muthamad is traveling back to Baghdad. And he happens to stop at a currency exchange stall in Haran. He starts talking to the money changer, a man named Thabit-Dibbincora. And a money changer is someone dealing constantly in fractions, conversion rates, rapid mental arithmetic. Right. Exactly. So Muthamad recognized that the man wasn't just doing basic commerce, you know. He had a profound, intuitive grasp of complex mathematics. So Muthamad just recruits him on the spot. Literally just takes him. Yeah. He pulls him out of the market and brings him into their inner circle. And that money changer goes on to make massive historical discoveries in algebra and geometry. It's incredible. It really proves that genius isn't confined to academic institutions. If you have the vision and, well, the funding to look for it, you can find brilliant minds working at a currency exchange stall. Absolutely. And that wealth gave them the freedom to not just archive knowledge, but to aggressively

5:14test it in the real world. Right. They were working alongside Titans of the era, like Al-Qorizmi and Al-Kindi. But the brothers were unique because they weren't satisfied with merely translating what the ancient Greeks thought about the universe. They wanted to prove it. Exactly. But empirical proof. Which brings us to a project that sounds like an absolute logistical nightmare. So the ancient Greeks had theorized that the circumference of the Earth was roughly 25,000 miles. Right. Eratosthenes. Yeah. And the California moon basically issues a challenge. He's like, go verify that. Now imagine you are tasked with measuring the entire planet, but you are living in the ninth century. Good luck. Right. You don't have satellites. You don't have lasers. The brother's solution was to travel out to the desert near Sanjar in northern Mesopotamia, equipped with essentially nothing but wooden pegs, long ropes in the night sky. Their methodology was brilliantly elegant though. Walk us through it. So they waited until nightfall and measured the exact altitude of the pole star in the

6:16sky. Then they started walking due north. Okay. As they walked, they drove wooden pegs into the hard desert ground and stretched a rope tightly between them to ensure they were walking in a perfectly straight line, measuring the exact distance they covered. Right. They kept walking north until the altitude of the pole star changed by exactly one degree. Then they returned to their starting point and did the exact same thing walking due south. See, I'm trying to picture the sheer physical toll of this. You're in the Mesopotamian desert. Whoa, it would have been grueling. But beyond that, I just have to challenge the accuracy here. You're telling me they used a giant protractor and a long piece of string to measure a planet. Uh, essentially, yes. Wait, how do you account for a rope stretching in the midday heat or just the fact that humans naturally drift and don't walk in perfectly straight lines, especially over dunes and uneven terrain? Well, those are the exact variables that ruin scientific experiments, right? And the brothers knew it. Yeah. That is why they didn't just do it once. The brilliance of their work lies in the rigorous repetition.

7:18By walking both north and south, they averaged out local topographical errors, but they went further. They packed up the entire expedition, traveled to a completely different geographical location al-Kufa, and repeated the entire grueling process all over again. Wow. Okay, so they were verifying their own data. Exactly. They were actively trying to control for environmental variables. By measuring the physical distance on the ground that corresponded to a one degree change in the star's altitude, they knew they had measured exactly one 360th of the Earth's circumference, multiply that distance by 360, and they arrived at their answer 24,000 miles, which is astonishingly close to the actual figure of about 24,900 miles. It's incredible. They achieve that precision using sticks, string, and exhaustion. Pretty much. And you can see that transition from theoretical to hyperpractical in their mathematical text too, specifically their treatise called the book on the measurement of plain and spherical

8:19figures. Oh, that specific book was foundational, medieval mathematicians like Fibonacci used it centuries later. Wow. Really? Yeah. The reason it was so revolutionary is that it fundamentally broke away from the Greek tradition of geometry. Think about Euclid or Archimedes. When the Greeks did geometry, they thought in terms of abstract ratios. Okay, like how? They would say that the area of a circle relates to its radius in a specific proportional relationship. It was a philosophical way of looking at shapes. Right. But the Banu Musa brothers needed something more concrete. Yes. They shifted that paradigm by expressing area and circumference as actual hard numerical values. It is the difference between reading a recipe that says use twice as much flour as sugar versus a recipe that says pour in exactly 500 grams of flour. That's a perfect analogy. One is relational concept. The other is an actionable blueprint. And that shift is the critical leap between a philosopher and an engineer. If you want to actually build a physical machine, ratios aren't enough.

9:22You need exact numbers. You need exact numbers to know how much brass to cut or exactly how much water a cylinder can hold. Because they had finally nailed down how to use exact concrete numbers, they could start building physical working mechanisms. Which perfectly explains the middle brother, A. Mad. As the author of the book of ingenious devices, a manuscript detailing a hundred different physical inventions. Yes. And looking at the breakdown of this book is hilarious because it highlights the dual nature of engineering. Out of the hundred inventions, about 25 are highly practical life-saving tools. We are talking about genuine industrial innovation here. They designed a gas mask for workers exploring polluted underground wells. They built a hurricane lamp and designed to withstand high winds without blowing out. They even engineered a mechanical grabbing tool for recovering heavy objects underwater. Right. The clamshell design. Yeah. The source material notes that it was constructed using two hinged tooth buckets that snapped together under rope tension, which is the exact same mechanical principle as the clamshell

10:24grabber you see on a modern construction excavator. It's identical. But that leaves 75 other inventions in the book. The vast majority of A. Mad's work was dedicated to trick pouring vessels. Party tricks. Teachers designed for fancy banquets that would pour wine, then pour water, and then pour a mixture of both, seemingly by magic. They were essentially 9th century parlor tricks designed to confuse rich guests. It is easy to dismiss those pictures as frivolous toys. But what's fascinating here is that the significance for the history of engineering isn't what the pictures did, it is how they functioned. Okay. Explain that. The trick picture was merely a physical shell hiding a labyrinth of fluid dynamics. To make a picture pour two different liquids automatically without the user doing anything, Aumad had to invent automatic one way and two way valves. He built concentric ciphons. Wait, break that down for me. How do you build a mechanical delay out of just water and gravity? Okay. Imagine a hidden secondary tank inside the picture.

11:25As you pour the first liquid, water is also slowly bleeding into this hidden chamber. Inside that chamber is a piece of cork, a float valve. Very similar to the ball floating in the back of your modern toilet tank. Oh, I see where this is going. Right. As the hidden chamber fills, the cork rises. Once the water reaches a specific height, the rising cork trips a hidden lever, which snaps a valve shut and opens a new one, changing the liquid being poured. That is so clever. The time it takes for that hidden tank to fill up creates a physical delay. It is a timer made entirely out of fluid pressure and gravity. They were creating even statements using water. Here's where it gets really interesting. Because they took those if and statements, those control valves, and they applied them to a completely different medium. Yes, they did. It's detailed in a separate manuscript called The Book on the Description of the Instrument, which sounds by itself. This wasn't a water picture. It was a massive automatic flute player. The conceptual leap here is just it's astonishing.

12:26They took the principles of flute control and used them to sequence information. The mechanism is brilliant. Think of a child's wind up music box. The kind of with a rotating metal cylinder covered in little raised bumps that pluck metal teach to make a song. Right. Everyone knows those. Now, scale that up and power it with a steam engine concept. The brothers used continuous water pressure to slowly rotate a large cylinder covered in strategically placed pins. As the cylinder turned, those pins pushed against levers. The levers acted like human fingers, dropping down to open and close the holes on a flute, while steam or steady air pressure was forced through the mouthpiece. The most revolutionary part. You could pull that pin cylinder out and swap it for a different cylinder with a different pattern of pins. And it would play a new song. Exactly. The machine would play a completely different song. That is physical coding. They separated the hardware, the air pressure and the levers from the software, the pin cylinder. Yes.

13:27They essentially invented a programmable machine, an early music sequencer hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution. It really is an early computer. Now, you would assume that inventing gas masks, measuring the globe and building the first programmable robots would make the brothers universally beloved. You would think so. But extreme brilliance combined with limitless state funding often breeds extreme arrogance. And they were incredibly arrogant. As they accumulated wealth under successive caliphs, they became deeply entrenched in court politics. Very deeply. They were basically the real housewives of ninth century Baghdad. They used their proximity to power to ruthlessly crush anyone they viewed as a rival. And the most glaring example of this is their treatment of al-Kindi, who was himself a legendary philosopher and mathematician. Yeah. The brothers viewed him as a threat to their monopoly on the caliph's favor. So they started by academically bullying him, harshly mocking his writings on the Astrolabe. Just petty academic stuff at first.

14:27Right. But academic debate wasn't enough. They leveraged their political influence to have al-Kindi physically beaten. Which is just awful. They have banished from the court and then they confiscated his entire personal library. This is workplace toxicity on a staggering scale. But when your entire career depends on the favor of an absolute monarch, playing political games is an existential risk. If you make enemies, you better not make any mistakes. Which brings us to the Joffrey Canal disaster. Oh boy. Caliph Al-Mutwakil decides to build a massive new city, and he demands the Banu Musa oversee the construction of a vital canal to supply it with water. The brothers, perhaps feeling that digging ditches was beneath their immense intellect, delegating the actual engineering and surveying work to a man named Al-Fargani. An Al-Fargani makes a catastrophic error in fluid dynamics. He digs the origin of the canal deeper than the destination. Water does not flow uphill. No. It does not. It is completed and the water is let in.

15:27It is not going to flow into the new city. It is going to drain away completely into the desert. Exactly. The ultimate masters of fluid pressure somehow oversaw a project that fundamentally failed at moving water. And the caliph finds out. And the caliph's response is swift and brutal. He decrees that on the day the canal is opened, if the water fails to reach the city, the Banu Musa brothers will be crucified on crosses erected right beside the dry river bed. Just brutal. It is incredible that the absolute terror of that four-month waiting period, imagine standing on a construction site looking at a dry ditch, knowing a mathematical error is going to end with you nailed to a piece of wood. They needed a miracle, or they needed someone willing to risk their own life to cover for them. And the person who steps in to save them is a consultant engineer named Sinad Binah. But here is the massive twist. Sinad Binah was close friends with Al-Kindy. The same scholar the brothers had beaten and robbed. The irony is thick. The brothers' lives are entirely in the hands of a man whose best friend they destroyed.

16:29It's like something out of a movie. Right. Sinad Binah approaches the terrified brothers and offers a deal. He says, I will save your lives, but my condition is that you immediately return Al-Kindy's library. And they agree instantly. Oh, of course they do. Yeah. So Sinad goes to the caliph. Now Sinad knows the canal is a total failure, but he also knows a piece of court gossip. Ah, the astrologers. Yes. The royal astrologers have recently predicted that the caliph only has a few months left to live. He decides to gamble his own life on a horoscope. He lies directly to the caliph's face. He proclaims that the canal is perfectly engineered, buying the brothers' time. Wow. For months, Sinad and the brothers sweat it out, waiting to see if the water will drop before the caliph drops. Talk about high stakes. Right. And incredibly, the gamble pays off. Just months before the canal's failure would become undeniable, the caliph Al-Mutawakil is assassinated. This raises an important question about the reality of state-sponsored science in the ancient world.

17:30What do you mean? Well, we love to romanticize the house of wisdom and the endless flow of gold for translation and research. But the sword cuts both ways. The Banu Musa brothers had limitless funding, but their genius, their research, and their literal survival, were entirely subject to the unpredictable moods, the whims, and the lifespans of absolute rulers. Yeah, it was a perilous way to innovate. But innovate they did. They escaped execution. The library was returned, and they went right back to their work. The eldest, Muth the Mod, even ended up negotiating military sieges later in his life, just continuing this relentlessly chaotic existence until his death in January 873. They lived large. But when you strip away the political madness, their legacy is undeniably monumental. They took abstract Greek theory, forced it into concrete numerical values, and used those numbers to manipulate the physical world in ways no one had ever seen. They are the vital bridge. They pushed humanity past philosophical observation, and into the realm of automated control.

18:31So what does this all mean? Why should you care about three chaotic brothers from 9th century Baghdad? All right. Because the next time you set up a smart home routine on your phone to turn on your lights at sunset, or you watch an automated sprinkler system adjust its own water pressure, or even if you just drop a coin into a claw machine at a local arcade to grab a stuffed animal, you are experiencing the distant echoes of their work. You really are. You are interacting with the legacy of three orphan boys who use ropes and pegs to measure the planet, and who forced water to become the world's first computer. That leaves us with one final profound thought to consider. What's that? When we look back at the book of ingenious devices, the vast majority of those incredible mechanical leaps, the automated valves, the mechanical delays, the feedback loops they weren't built for industry. Right. They were for the parties. They were originally designed simply to entertain party guests. They were frivolous toys. It makes you wonder what obscure video game mechanics are seemingly pointless digital toys being developed right now just for entertainment, are secretly laying the invisible functional

19:36foundations for our most critical future technology. From a magic trick at a party to the future of engineering, thanks for joining us on this deep dive. You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own is free and easy. We upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and hundreds more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads like this. Even with just 10 listeners a month. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start free at RSS.com.