This is all very impressive. It does beg the question why are Arab
countries no longer seen as the cradle of technical innovation?
Gervas
--- In tech4all@yahoogroups.com, "Arun Vasireddy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> This is my first post. Hope you like it!
>
> How Arab inventors changed the world
>
> From coffee to cheques and the three-course meal, the Muslim world
> has given us many innovations that we take for granted in daily
> life. As a new exhibition opens, Paul Vallely nominates 20 of the
> most influential- and identifies the men of genius behind them
> Published: 11 March 2006
>
> 1 The story goes that an Arab named Khalid was tending his goats in
> the Kaffa region of southern Ethiopia, when he noticed his animals
> became livelier after eating a certain berry. He boiled the berries
> to make the first coffee. Certainly the first record of the drink is
> of beans exported from Ethiopia to Yemen where Sufis drank it to
> stay awake all night to pray on special occasions. By the late 15th
> century it had arrived in Mecca and Turkey from where it made its
> way to Venice in 1645. It was brought to England in 1650 by a Turk
> named Pasqua Rosee who opened the first coffee house in Lombard
> Street in the City of London. The Arabic qahwa became the Turkish
> kahve then the Italian caffé and then English coffee.
>
> 2 The ancient Greeks thought our eyes emitted rays, like a laser,
> which enabled us to see. The first person to realise that light
> enters the eye, rather than leaving it, was the 10th-century Muslim
> mathematician, astronomer and physicist Ibn al-Haitham. He invented
> the first pin-hole camera after noticing the way light came through
> a hole in window shutters. The smaller the hole, the better the
> picture, he worked out, and set up the first Camera Obscura (from
> the Arab word qamara for a dark or private room). He is also
> credited with being the first man to shift physics from a
> philosophical activity to an experimental one.
>
> 3 A form of chess was played in ancient India but the game was
> developed into the form we know it today in Persia. From there it
> spread westward to Europe - where it was introduced by the Moors in
> Spain in the 10th century - and eastward as far as Japan. The word
> rook comes from the Persian rukh, which means chariot.
>
> 4 A thousand years before the Wright brothers a Muslim poet,
> astronomer, musician and engineer named Abbas ibn Firnas made
> several attempts to construct a flying machine. In 852 he jumped
> from the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba using a loose cloak
> stiffened with wooden struts. He hoped to glide like a bird. He
> didn't. But the cloak slowed his fall, creating what is thought to
> be the first parachute, and leaving him with only minor injuries. In
> 875, aged 70, having perfected a machine of silk and eagles'
> feathers he tried again, jumping from a mountain. He flew to a
> significant height and stayed aloft for ten minutes but crashed on
> landing - concluding, correctly, that it was because he had not
> given his device a tail so it would stall on landing. Baghdad
> international airport and a crater on the Moon are named after him.
>
> 5 Washing and bathing are religious requirements for Muslims, which
> is perhaps why they perfected the recipe for soap which we still use
> today. The ancient Egyptians had soap of a kind, as did the Romans
> who used it more as a pomade. But it was the Arabs who combined
> vegetable oils with sodium hydroxide and aromatics such as thyme
> oil. One of the Crusaders' most striking characteristics, to Arab
> nostrils, was that they did not wash. Shampoo was introduced to
> England by a Muslim who opened Mahomed's Indian Vapour Baths on
> Brighton seafront in 1759 and was appointed Shampooing Surgeon to
> Kings George IV and William IV.
>
> 6 Distillation, the means of separating liquids through differences
> in their boiling points, was invented around the year 800 by Islam's
> foremost scientist, Jabir ibn Hayyan, who transformed alchemy into
> chemistry, inventing many of the basic processes and apparatus still
> in use today - liquefaction, crystallisation, distillation,
> purification, oxidisation, evaporation and filtration. As well as
> discovering sulphuric and nitric acid, he invented the alembic
> still, giving the world intense rosewater and other perfumes and
> alcoholic spirits (although drinking them is haram, or forbidden, in
> Islam). Ibn Hayyan emphasised systematic experimentation and was the
> founder of modern chemistry.
>
> 7 The crank-shaft is a device which translates rotary into linear
> motion and is central to much of the machinery in the modern world,
> not least the internal combustion engine. One of the most important
> mechanical inventions in the history of humankind, it was created by
> an ingenious Muslim engineer called al-Jazari to raise water for
> irrigation. His 1206 Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical
> Devices shows he also invented or refined the use of valves and
> pistons, devised some of the first mechanical clocks driven by water
> and weights, and was the father of robotics. Among his 50 other
> inventions was the combination lock.
>
> 8 Quilting is a method of sewing or tying two layers of cloth with a
> layer of insulating material in between. It is not clear whether it
> was invented in the Muslim world or whether it was imported there
> from India or China. But it certainly came to the West via the
> Crusaders. They saw it used by Saracen warriors, who wore straw-
> filled quilted canvas shirts instead of armour. As well as a form of
> protection, it proved an effective guard against the chafing of the
> Crusaders' metal armour and was an effective form of insulation - so
> much so that it became a cottage industry back home in colder
> climates such as Britain and Holland.
>
> 9 The pointed arch so characteristic of Europe's Gothic cathedrals
> was an invention borrowed from Islamic architecture. It was much
> stronger than the rounded arch used by the Romans and Normans, thus
> allowing the building of bigger, higher, more complex and grander
> buildings. Other borrowings from Muslim genius included ribbed
> vaulting, rose windows and dome-building techniques. Europe's
> castles were also adapted to copy the Islamic world's - with arrow
> slits, battlements, a barbican and parapets. Square towers and keeps
> gave way to more easily defended round ones. Henry V's castle
> architect was a Muslim.
>
> 10 Many modern surgical instruments are of exactly the same design
> as those devised in the 10th century by a Muslim surgeon called al-
> Zahrawi. His scalpels, bone saws, forceps, fine scissors for eye
> surgery and many of the 200 instruments he devised are recognisable
> to a modern surgeon. It was he who discovered that catgut used for
> internal stitches dissolves away naturally (a discovery he made when
> his monkey ate his lute strings) and that it can be also used to
> make medicine capsules. In the 13th century, another Muslim medic
> named Ibn Nafis described the circulation of the blood, 300 years
> before William Harvey discovered it. Muslims doctors also invented
> anaesthetics of opium and alcohol mixes and developed hollow needles
> to suck cataracts from eyes in a technique still used today.
>
> 11 The windmill was invented in 634 for a Persian caliph and was
> used to grind corn and draw up water for irrigation. In the vast
> deserts of Arabia, when the seasonal streams ran dry, the only
> source of power was the wind which blew steadily from one direction
> for months. Mills had six or 12 sails covered in fabric or palm
> leaves. It was 500 years before the first windmill was seen in
> Europe.
>
> 12 The technique of inoculation was not invented by Jenner and
> Pasteur but was devised in the Muslim world and brought to Europe
> from Turkey by the wife of the English ambassador to Istanbul in
> 1724. Children in Turkey were vaccinated with cowpox to fight the
> deadly smallpox at least 50 years before the West discovered it.
>
> 13 The fountain pen was invented for the Sultan of Egypt in 953
> after he demanded a pen which would not stain his hands or clothes.
> It held ink in a reservoir and, as with modern pens, fed ink to the
> nib by a combination of gravity and capillary action.
>
> 14 The system of numbering in use all round the world is probably
> Indian in origin but the style of the numerals is Arabic and first
> appears in print in the work of the Muslim mathematicians al-
> Khwarizmi and al-Kindi around 825. Algebra was named after al-
> Khwarizmi's book, Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, much of whose contents
> are still in use. The work of Muslim maths scholars was imported
> into Europe 300 years later by the Italian mathematician Fibonacci.
> Algorithms and much of the theory of trigonometry came from the
> Muslim world. And Al-Kindi's discovery of frequency analysis
> rendered all the codes of the ancient world soluble and created the
> basis of modern cryptology.
>
> 15 Ali ibn Nafi, known by his nickname of Ziryab (Blackbird) came
> from Iraq to Cordoba in the 9th century and brought with him the
> concept of the three-course meal - soup, followed by fish or meat,
> then fruit and nuts. He also introduced crystal glasses (which had
> been invented after experiments with rock crystal by Abbas ibn
> Firnas - see No 4).
>
> 16 Carpets were regarded as part of Paradise by medieval Muslims,
> thanks to their advanced weaving techniques, new tinctures from
> Islamic chemistry and highly developed sense of pattern and
> arabesque which were the basis of Islam's non-representational art.
> In contrast, Europe's floors were distinctly earthly, not to say
> earthy, until Arabian and Persian carpets were introduced. In
> England, as Erasmus recorded, floors were "covered in rushes,
> occasionally renewed, but so imperfectly that the bottom layer is
> left undisturbed, sometimes for 20 years, harbouring expectoration,
> vomiting, the leakage of dogs and men, ale droppings, scraps of
> fish, and other abominations not fit to be mentioned". Carpets,
> unsurprisingly, caught on quickly.
>
> 17 The modern cheque comes from the Arabic saqq, a written vow to
> pay for goods when they were delivered, to avoid money having to be
> transported across dangerous terrain. In the 9th century, a Muslim
> businessman could cash a cheque in China drawn on his bank in
> Baghdad.
>
> 18 By the 9th century, many Muslim scholars took it for granted that
> the Earth was a sphere. The proof, said astronomer Ibn Hazm, "is
> that the Sun is always vertical to a particular spot on Earth". It
> was 500 years before that realisation dawned on Galileo. The
> calculations of Muslim astronomers were so accurate that in the 9th
> century they reckoned the Earth's circumference to be 40,253.4km -
> less than 200km out. The scholar al-Idrisi took a globe depicting
> the world to the court of King Roger of Sicily in 1139.
>
> 19 Though the Chinese invented saltpetre gunpowder, and used it in
> their fireworks, it was the Arabs who worked out that it could be
> purified using potassium nitrate for military use. Muslim incendiary
> devices terrified the Crusaders. By the 15th century they had
> invented both a rocket, which they called a "self-moving and
> combusting egg", and a torpedo - a self-propelled pear-shaped bomb
> with a spear at the front which impaled itself in enemy ships and
> then blew up.
>
> 20 Medieval Europe had kitchen and herb gardens, but it was the
> Arabs who developed the idea of the garden as a place of beauty and
> meditation. The first royal pleasure gardens in Europe were opened
> in 11th-century Muslim Spain. Flowers which originated in Muslim
> gardens include the carnation and the tulip.
>
> "1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in Our World" is a
> new exhibition which began a nationwide tour this week. It is
> currently at the Science Museum in Manchester. For more information,
> go to www.1001inventions.com.
>
> 1 The story goes that an Arab named Khalid was tending his goats in
> the Kaffa region of southern Ethiopia, when he noticed his animals
> became livelier after eating a certain berry. He boiled the berries
> to make the first coffee. Certainly the first record of the drink is
> of beans exported from Ethiopia to Yemen where Sufis drank it to
> stay awake all night to pray on special occasions. By the late 15th
> century it had arrived in Mecca and Turkey from where it made its
> way to Venice in 1645. It was brought to England in 1650 by a Turk
> named Pasqua Rosee who opened the first coffee house in Lombard
> Street in the City of London. The Arabic qahwa became the Turkish
> kahve then the Italian caffé and then English coffee.
>
> 2 The ancient Greeks thought our eyes emitted rays, like a laser,
> which enabled us to see. The first person to realise that light
> enters the eye, rather than leaving it, was the 10th-century Muslim
> mathematician, astronomer and physicist Ibn al-Haitham. He invented
> the first pin-hole camera after noticing the way light came through
> a hole in window shutters. The smaller the hole, the better the
> picture, he worked out, and set up the first Camera Obscura (from
> the Arab word qamara for a dark or private room). He is also
> credited with being the first man to shift physics from a
> philosophical activity to an experimental one.
>
> 3 A form of chess was played in ancient India but the game was
> developed into the form we know it today in Persia. From there it
> spread westward to Europe - where it was introduced by the Moors in
> Spain in the 10th century - and eastward as far as Japan. The word
> rook comes from the Persian rukh, which means chariot.
>
> 4 A thousand years before the Wright brothers a Muslim poet,
> astronomer, musician and engineer named Abbas ibn Firnas made
> several attempts to construct a flying machine. In 852 he jumped
> from the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba using a loose cloak
> stiffened with wooden struts. He hoped to glide like a bird. He
> didn't. But the cloak slowed his fall, creating what is thought to
> be the first parachute, and leaving him with only minor injuries. In
> 875, aged 70, having perfected a machine of silk and eagles'
> feathers he tried again, jumping from a mountain. He flew to a
> significant height and stayed aloft for ten minutes but crashed on
> landing - concluding, correctly, that it was because he had not
> given his device a tail so it would stall on landing. Baghdad
> international airport and a crater on the Moon are named after him.
>
> 5 Washing and bathing are religious requirements for Muslims, which
> is perhaps why they perfected the recipe for soap which we still use
> today. The ancient Egyptians had soap of a kind, as did the Romans
> who used it more as a pomade. But it was the Arabs who combined
> vegetable oils with sodium hydroxide and aromatics such as thyme
> oil. One of the Crusaders' most striking characteristics, to Arab
> nostrils, was that they did not wash. Shampoo was introduced to
> England by a Muslim who opened Mahomed's Indian Vapour Baths on
> Brighton seafront in 1759 and was appointed Shampooing Surgeon to
> Kings George IV and William IV.
>
> 6 Distillation, the means of separating liquids through differences
> in their boiling points, was invented around the year 800 by Islam's
> foremost scientist, Jabir ibn Hayyan, who transformed alchemy into
> chemistry, inventing many of the basic processes and apparatus still
> in use today - liquefaction, crystallisation, distillation,
> purification, oxidisation, evaporation and filtration. As well as
> discovering sulphuric and nitric acid, he invented the alembic
> still, giving the world intense rosewater and other perfumes and
> alcoholic spirits (although drinking them is haram, or forbidden, in
> Islam). Ibn Hayyan emphasised systematic experimentation and was the
> founder of modern chemistry.
>
> 7 The crank-shaft is a device which translates rotary into linear
> motion and is central to much of the machinery in the modern world,
> not least the internal combustion engine. One of the most important
> mechanical inventions in the history of humankind, it was created by
> an ingenious Muslim engineer called al-Jazari to raise water for
> irrigation. His 1206 Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical
> Devices shows he also invented or refined the use of valves and
> pistons, devised some of the first mechanical clocks driven by water
> and weights, and was the father of robotics. Among his 50 other
> inventions was the combination lock.
>
> 8 Quilting is a method of sewing or tying two layers of cloth with a
> layer of insulating material in between. It is not clear whether it
> was invented in the Muslim world or whether it was imported there
> from India or China. But it certainly came to the West via the
> Crusaders. They saw it used by Saracen warriors, who wore straw-
> filled quilted canvas shirts instead of armour. As well as a form of
> protection, it proved an effective guard against the chafing of the
> Crusaders' metal armour and was an effective form of insulation - so
> much so that it became a cottage industry back home in colder
> climates such as Britain and Holland.
>
> 9 The pointed arch so characteristic of Europe's Gothic cathedrals
> was an invention borrowed from Islamic architecture. It was much
> stronger than the rounded arch used by the Romans and Normans, thus
> allowing the building of bigger, higher, more complex and grander
> buildings. Other borrowings from Muslim genius included ribbed
> vaulting, rose windows and dome-building techniques. Europe's
> castles were also adapted to copy the Islamic world's - with arrow
> slits, battlements, a barbican and parapets. Square towers and keeps
> gave way to more easily defended round ones. Henry V's castle
> architect was a Muslim.
>
> 10 Many modern surgical instruments are of exactly the same design
> as those devised in the 10th century by a Muslim surgeon called al-
> Zahrawi. His scalpels, bone saws, forceps, fine scissors for eye
> surgery and many of the 200 instruments he devised are recognisable
> to a modern surgeon. It was he who discovered that catgut used for
> internal stitches dissolves away naturally (a discovery he made when
> his monkey ate his lute strings) and that it can be also used to
> make medicine capsules. In the 13th century, another Muslim medic
> named Ibn Nafis described the circulation of the blood, 300 years
> before William Harvey discovered it. Muslims doctors also invented
> anaesthetics of opium and alcohol mixes and developed hollow needles
> to suck cataracts from eyes in a technique still used today.
>
> 11 The windmill was invented in 634 for a Persian caliph and was
> used to grind corn and draw up water for irrigation. In the vast
> deserts of Arabia, when the seasonal streams ran dry, the only
> source of power was the wind which blew steadily from one direction
> for months. Mills had six or 12 sails covered in fabric or palm
> leaves. It was 500 years before the first windmill was seen in
> Europe.
>
> 12 The technique of inoculation was not invented by Jenner and
> Pasteur but was devised in the Muslim world and brought to Europe
> from Turkey by the wife of the English ambassador to Istanbul in
> 1724. Children in Turkey were vaccinated with cowpox to fight the
> deadly smallpox at least 50 years before the West discovered it.
>
> 13 The fountain pen was invented for the Sultan of Egypt in 953
> after he demanded a pen which would not stain his hands or clothes.
> It held ink in a reservoir and, as with modern pens, fed ink to the
> nib by a combination of gravity and capillary action.
>
> 14 The system of numbering in use all round the world is probably
> Indian in origin but the style of the numerals is Arabic and first
> appears in print in the work of the Muslim mathematicians al-
> Khwarizmi and al-Kindi around 825. Algebra was named after al-
> Khwarizmi's book, Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, much of whose contents
> are still in use. The work of Muslim maths scholars was imported
> into Europe 300 years later by the Italian mathematician Fibonacci.
> Algorithms and much of the theory of trigonometry came from the
> Muslim world. And Al-Kindi's discovery of frequency analysis
> rendered all the codes of the ancient world soluble and created the
> basis of modern cryptology.
>
> 15 Ali ibn Nafi, known by his nickname of Ziryab (Blackbird) came
> from Iraq to Cordoba in the 9th century and brought with him the
> concept of the three-course meal - soup, followed by fish or meat,
> then fruit and nuts. He also introduced crystal glasses (which had
> been invented after experiments with rock crystal by Abbas ibn
> Firnas - see No 4).
>
> 16 Carpets were regarded as part of Paradise by medieval Muslims,
> thanks to their advanced weaving techniques, new tinctures from
> Islamic chemistry and highly developed sense of pattern and
> arabesque which were the basis of Islam's non-representational art.
> In contrast, Europe's floors were distinctly earthly, not to say
> earthy, until Arabian and Persian carpets were introduced. In
> England, as Erasmus recorded, floors were "covered in rushes,
> occasionally renewed, but so imperfectly that the bottom layer is
> left undisturbed, sometimes for 20 years, harbouring expectoration,
> vomiting, the leakage of dogs and men, ale droppings, scraps of
> fish, and other abominations not fit to be mentioned". Carpets,
> unsurprisingly, caught on quickly.
>
> 17 The modern cheque comes from the Arabic saqq, a written vow to
> pay for goods when they were delivered, to avoid money having to be
> transported across dangerous terrain. In the 9th century, a Muslim
> businessman could cash a cheque in China drawn on his bank in
> Baghdad.
>
> 18 By the 9th century, many Muslim scholars took it for granted that
> the Earth was a sphere. The proof, said astronomer Ibn Hazm, "is
> that the Sun is always vertical to a particular spot on Earth". It
> was 500 years before that realisation dawned on Galileo. The
> calculations of Muslim astronomers were so accurate that in the 9th
> century they reckoned the Earth's circumference to be 40,253.4km -
> less than 200km out. The scholar al-Idrisi took a globe depicting
> the world to the court of King Roger of Sicily in 1139.
>
> 19 Though the Chinese invented saltpetre gunpowder, and used it in
> their fireworks, it was the Arabs who worked out that it could be
> purified using potassium nitrate for military use. Muslim incendiary
> devices terrified the Crusaders. By the 15th century they had
> invented both a rocket, which they called a "self-moving and
> combusting egg", and a torpedo - a self-propelled pear-shaped bomb
> with a spear at the front which impaled itself in enemy ships and
> then blew up.
>
> 20 Medieval Europe had kitchen and herb gardens, but it was the
> Arabs who developed the idea of the garden as a place of beauty and
> meditation. The first royal pleasure gardens in Europe were opened
> in 11th-century Muslim Spain. Flowers which originated in Muslim
> gardens include the carnation and the tulip.
>
> "1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in Our World" is a
> new exhibition which began a nationwide tour this week. It is
> currently at the Science Museum in Manchester. For more information,
> go to www.1001inventions.com.
>
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