Jie People - South Pointing Chariot

South Pointing Chariot

Fang Xuanling recorded in the Book of Jin chronicle that at around 340 CE a Jie state Later Zhao's scholar Xie Fei serving as a Head of Healing (Medicinal) Department in the Later Zhao State Chancellery, was a mechanical engineer who built a South Pointing Chariot (also called south-pointing carriage), a directional compass vehicle which apparently did not use magnetic principle, but was operated by use of differential gears (which apply an equal amount of torque to driving wheels rotating at different speeds), or a similar angular differential principle.

For the great ingenuity shown in the construction of the device, the Later Zhao Emperor Shi Jilong granted Jie Fei the noble title of hou without land possessions and generous rewarded him generously.

Read more about this topic:  Jie People

Famous quotes containing the words south, pointing and/or chariot:

    The white gulls south of Victoria
    catch tossed crumbs in midair.
    When anyone hears the Catbird
    he gets lonesome.
    Gary Snyder (b. 1930)

    Parents can fail to cheer your successes as wildly as you expected, pointing out that you are sharing your Nobel Prize with a couple of other people, or that your Oscar was for supporting actress, not really for a starring role. More subtly, they can cheer your successes too wildly, forcing you into the awkward realization that your achievement of merely graduating or getting the promotion did not warrant the fireworks and brass band.
    Frank Pittman (20th century)

    Away with the cant of “Measures, not men!”Mthe idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along. No, Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.
    George Canning (1770–1827)