Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Born on this day in 1886, the explorer was only in his twenties when in 1910 he volunteered to go to the Antarctic with explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his men. Their mission: to be first to make it to the South Pole. That expedition did not go as planned—at all. But it led to the writing of his book, which chronicled his adventure seeking emperor penguin embryos and of being a part of the search party that found the body of Scott and his two companions, Lt. Henry Bowers and Edward A. Wilson, the expedition’s chief scientist.
Al-Jazari created a programmable drum machine with pegs (cams) that bump into little levers that operated the percussion. The drummer could be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns if the pegs were moved around. According to Charles B. Fowler, the automata were a “robot band” which performed “more than fifty facial and body actions during each musical selection.”
The elephant clock was described by Al-Jazari in 1206 is notable for several innovations. It was the first clock in which an automaton reacted after certain intervals of time (in this case, a humanoid robot striking the cymbal and a mechanical robotic bird chirping) and the first water clock to accurately record the passage of the temporal hours to match the uneven length of days throughout the year. 