Su's clock tower also featured the earliest known endless power-transmitting chain drive in the world, as outlined in his horological treatise of 1092. Su's clock tower employed the escapement mechanism two centuries before it was applied in clocks of Europe. However, Su was most famous for his hydraulic-powered astronomical clock tower, crowned with a mechanically driven armillary sphere, which was erected in the capital city of Kaifeng in the year 1088. He also was the author of a large celestial atlas of five different star maps, and his extensive written and illustrative work in cartography helped solve a heated border dispute between the Song dynasty and its Khitan neighbor of the Liao dynasty. This treatise included many medicinal applications, including the use of ephedrin as a pharmaceutical drug. Su Song, one of Shen Kuo's political rivals at court, wrote a famous pharmaceutical treatise in 1070 known as the Bencao Tujing, which included related subjects on botany, zoology, metallurgy, and mineralogy.
The court fully accepted their corrections to lunar and solar error, but only partially adopted Shen and Wei's corrected plotting of the planetary orbital paths and various speeds. Unfortunately Shen had many political rivals at court who were determined to sabotage his work. One of Shen's greatest achievements, aided by Wei Pu, was correcting the lunar error by diligently recording and plotting the moon's orbital path three times a night over a period of five years. Along with his colleague Wei Pu in the Bureau of Astronomy, Shen used cosmological hypotheses when describing the variations of planetary motion, including retrogradation.
Using contemporary knowledge of solar eclipses and lunar eclipses, he theorized that the sun and moon were spherical in shape, not flat, while expanding upon the reasoning of earlier Chinese astronomical theorists. Shen was also interested in geology, as he formulated a theory of geomorphology and climate change over time after making observations of strange natural phenomena.
Shen was made famous for his written description of Bi Sheng, the inventor of movable type printing. This allowed sailors to navigate the seas more accurately with the magnetic needle compass, also first described by Shen. Shen is famous for discovering the concept of true north and magnetic declination towards the North Pole by calculating a more accurate measurement of the astronomical meridian, and fixing the calculated position of the pole star that had shifted over the centuries. Polymath geniuses-that is, people knowledgeable across an encyclopaedic range of topics-such as Shen Kuo (1031–1095) and Su Song (1020–1101) embodied the spirit of early empirical science and technology in the Song era. The original diagram of the book by Su Song in 1092, showing the inner workings of his clock tower, with the clepsydra tank, a waterwheel with scoops and the escapement, a chain drive, the armillary sphere crowning the top, and the rotating wheel with clock jacks that sounded the hours with bells, gongs, and drums. These advances, along with the introduction of paper-printed money, helped revolutionize and sustain the economy of the Song dynasty. Notable advances in civil engineering, nautics, and metallurgy were made in Song China, as well as the introduction of the windmill to China during the thirteenth century. The application of new weapons employing the use of gunpowder enabled the Song to ward off its militant enemies-the Liao, Western Xia, and Jin with weapons such as cannons-until its collapse to the Mongol forces of Kublai Khan in the late 13th century. The application of movable type printing advanced the already widespread use of woodblock printing to educate and amuse Confucian students and the masses. The Song engineer Su Song admitted that he and his contemporaries were building upon the achievements of the ancients such as Zhang Heng (78–139), an astronomer, inventor, and early master of mechanical gears. The ingenuity of advanced mechanical engineering had a long tradition in China. The Song dynasty ( Chinese: 宋朝 960–1279 CE) invented some technological advances in Chinese history, many of which came from talented statesmen drafted by the government through imperial examinations.
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