He was probably the first head of the Museum of Alexandria. He wrote the first survived to the present treatises on the science of compressed air and its uses in pumps. This, in combination with his work on the elasticity of air—Pneumatica, earned him the title of father of pneumatics.
Ctesibius of Alexandria is credited with inventing the pipe organ in the 3rd century B.C. In a pipe organ air is compressed in a chamber to which multiple pipes are attached. The water pipe organ, or hydraulis, reentered Europe in AD 757 as a gift to Pepin the Short (Charlemagne’s father) by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Copronymus.
While most of his work was based on using compressed air as a control substance and he is known as the Father of Pneumatics, his most famous control system was the feedback he added to the already existing water clocks of the day.
Unlike the version of the clocks that was reliant upon two pots and the flow of water aided only by gravity, Ctesibius’s water clock used a system of gears and a water wheel to track the passage of time and report the time using an arrow on a scale that signaled to the user the current time.
Ctesibius together with Philon Byzantius, and Hero were the three most famous engineers of Hellenistic Alexandria, whose studies mark a significant progress in hydraulics. This progress allowed installation of advanced water supply systems like that of the citadel at Pergamon, in which pressure pipes (probably made of metal) were implemented.
Ctesibius of Alexandria
