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Islamic inventions and developments are responsible
to many of the products we now take for granted. Muslims, especially in
the old days have proven themselves to be a people of great ingenuity
and innovation. There has been some debate among historians as to
whether Muslims were indeed the earliest inventors of all the concepts
listed below, but whether they were indeed the first, or just
contributed to an on-going development process of these discoveries –
their innovation and discoveries are fascinating. Discussed below are
some of the most interesting and famous discoveries and innovations,
attributed to people of the Islam.
Coffee
It is an Arab who was said to have been one of the first to discover the
invigorating effects of coffee when he found his goats becoming lively
after eating coffee berries. One of the first documented records of
coffee drinking was that of Sufis who drank the brew in order to keep
themselves from sleeping during prayer vigils. By 1645, coffee was
introduced in Venice, and by 1650, it has found its way to England,
where it spread to other parts of Europe and the rest of the world.
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Ornamental gardens
Gardens were already present in medieval Europe, although they were
simply used for the function of cultivating vegetables and herbs. The
Arabs invented the idea of gardens as a place of meditation and beauty.
Europe saw its first royal pleasure garden in Spain when it was occupied
by the Moors in the 11th century. The tulip and the carnation are
flowers which had their origins in Muslim gardens.
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Parachute
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.
Pin-Hole Camera
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.
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Windmill
The year 634 saw the invention of the windmill. It was initially offered
to a caliph in Persia for drawing water for irrigation and grinding
corn. The invention of the windmill was an important development that
helped produce power in a land where water was scarce and power sources
to reach those waters were similarly in short supply. The first
windmills were made of six or twelve sails that were covered in palm
leaves or fabric. Five hundred years had passed before Europe had its
first windmill.
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Numerical Numbering
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. |