Fine Technology is the kind of engineering that is concerned with delicate mechanisms and sophisticated controls. Before modern times the category comprised clocks, trick vessels, automata, fountains and a few miscellaneous devices. Some of these machines – water-clocks for example – served practical purposes, whereas others were designed for amusement or aesthetic pleasure. The apparent triviality of many of these constructions should not, however, be allowed to obscure the fact that a number of the ideas, components and techniques embodied in them were to be of great significance in the development of machine technology. Indeed, the influence of fine technology upon the Industrial Revolution was certainly more important, from a purely technical point of view, than that of the utilitarian machines discussed in the previous chapter. Moreover, the construction of moving simulacra of humans, animals and the heavens was an important factor in inducing mankind to regard the universe in mechanistic terms.

Unlike the utilitarian machines, very little archaeological evidence exists in the case of fine technology, whose constructions were almost always too fragile to survive the passage of time. We therefore have to rely very largely upon literary and iconographic sources for our information on the construction and operation of these machines. As we shall see in the course of this chapter, however, there is sufficient supporting evidence to show that they were practicable devices that were actually manufactured, not simply the paper constructions of theoretical scholars. The Islamic engineers who devoted some of their attention to fine technology had predecessors whose works were available to them. There is no evidence that Chinese or Indian treatises were among the documents that were transmitted to the Muslims; their sources lay in the Hellenistic culture of the Near East.

Our earliest information about the origins of fine technology occurs in the writings of Vitruvius, who attributes the invention of the organ and the monumental water-clock to an Egyptian engineer named Ctesibius, who worked in Alexandria around 300 BC.