History Mesh

Su Song (11-12th Century)

Su Song was a Chinese polymath, spending his time variously as diplomat, pharmacologist, engineer and poet, amongst many other disciplines. He designed a water-driven astronomical clock tower in the eleventh century AD (although its use of an early escapement mechanism was due to inventions by the Buddhist monk Yi Xing in the eight century), completed a large celestial atlas which is the oldest surviving printed star map, and an extended treatise that covers mineralogy, zoology, botany and metallurgy, and which documented the use of ephedrine as a drug.

Read more about Su Song on Wikipedia.