for the staff that translates to "Revealer of Profundities", while the term "Jacob's staff" was used by his Christian contemporaries. Its invention was likely due to fellow French-Jewish astronomer Jacob ben Makir, who also lived in Provence in the same period. Attribution to 15th century Austrian astronomer Georg Purbach is less likely, because Purbach was not born until 1423. (Such attributions may refer to a different instrument with the same name.) Its origins may be traced to the Chaldeans around 400 BC. Although it has become quite accepted that ben Gerson first described Jacob's staff, the British Sinologist Joseph Needham theorizes that the Song Dynasty Chinese scientist Shen Kuo (1031–1095), in his Dream Pool Essays of 1088, described a Jacob's staff. Shen was an antiquarian interested in ancient objects; after he unearthed an ancient crossbow-like device from a home's garden in Jiangsu, he realized it had a sight with a graduated scale that could be used to measure the heights of distant mountains, likening it to how mathematicians measure heights by using right-angle triangles. He wrote that when one viewed the whole breadth of a mountain with it, the distance on the instrument was long; when viewing a small part of the mountainside, the distance was short; this, he wrote, was due to the cross piece that had to be pushed further away from the eye, while the graduation started from the further end. Needham does not mention any practical application of this observation. During the medieval European Renaissance, the Dutch mathematician and surveyor Adriaan Metius developed his own Jacob's staff; Dutch mathematician Gemma Frisius made improvements to this instrument. In the 15th century, the German mathematician Johannes Müller (called Regiomontanus) made the instrument popular in geodesic and astronomical measurements. Construction In the original form of the cross-staff, the pole or main staff was marked with graduations for length. The cross-piece (BC in the drawing to the right), also called the transom or transversal, slides up and down on the main staff. On older instruments, the ends of the transom were cut straight across. Newer instruments had brass fittings on the ends, with holes in the brass for observation. (In marine archaeology, these fittings are often the only components of a cross-staff that survive.) It was common to provide several transoms, each with a different range of angles it would measure; three transoms were common. In later instruments, separate transoms