The Inventions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Inventions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coffee

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.

"Arabian coffee-drinking began almost 12 centuries ago (850 A.D.) when an Abyssinian goat herder named Khalid noticed that while the afternoon sun made him drowsy, his flock frolicked and skipped about after nibbling at some berries. Khalid either ate the berries whole, or ground and boiled them.

When his wife saw how energetic the normally exhausted Khalid was, she urged him to share this miraculous discovery with the local holy man at the monastery. The chief monk did not share Khalid's enthusiasm. Declaring the berries "the work of the Devil," he flung them into a fire to banish their offending presence. Soon the room filled with the delicious aroma of roasting berries, and other monks hurried in to discover the source of this new delight."

Notice above, that the passage says the goat herder named Khalid (or Kaldi as he is named in another version of the story) was an Abyssinian. Abyssinians were predominantly Orthodox Christians. In addition, there is no such thing as monasteries or monks in Islam. In fact, it is forbidden (Qur'an 57:027). Therefore, if this legend were to be true, Khalid (or Kaldi) would not have been a Muslim, but a Christian.

Vision

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.

The basic optical principles of the pinhole are commented on in Chinese texts from the 5th century BC. Ibn al-Haitham might have been the first to realize that light enters the eyes, but the claim that he invented the pin-hole camera is false. Giovanni Battista della Porta (1538 – 1615), a scientist from Naples, was long thought to have been the inventor, due to his description found inside Magia naturalis (1558). However, the first published picture of a pin-hole camera is a drawing in Gemma Frisius' De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica (1545).

While both the Latin and Arabic languages have borrowed from each other, the Latin language actually pre-dates classic Arabic (the precursor to modern Arabic) by at least 1,600 years. The term “camera”  was not derived from the Arabic word “qamara”. “Camera” is a Latin word meaning a vaulted or arched space, derived from the Greek καμαρα, which refers to anything with an arched cover. The Italian word "camera", the French word "chambre", and the English word "chamber" all share the same Latin root. "Camera obscura" literally meaning a “dark room”. The term “camera”, as applied today, was first coined by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). The Arabic word “qamara” has almost certainly been borrowed from the Latin word "camera", and at best the similarity between the two words is a coincidence.

Chess

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.

British archaeologists in July 2002 unearthed an ivory chess piece, at a Byzantine palace in southern Albania proving that Europeans were playing chess a lot earlier than what was previously thought. The recent discoveries, dating back to the 6th Century (500 years older than any other), seem to have been largely ignored to allow Muslims to claim that they were the real brains that introduced chess to the idiotic West 400 years later, through Spain in the 10th Century. And while the form of chess we know today was largely (though not completely) developed in Persia, it was by Zoroastrian (rather than Islamic) Persians prior to the Muslim Arab invasions. Also ironic is the fact that chess is forbidden in Islam, as it was condemned by Muhammad who compared playing chess with dying ones hand with the flesh and blood of swine. So in reality, Paul Vallely and Muslims themselves claiming Islam was the cause of the spread of chess to Europe is an offence to the pious, and would no doubt have Muhammad rolling in his grave.

Flying

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.

To get to the root of the facts concerning who was the first to fly, one must go to the very basics first. As far as flying is concerned, at the beginning were the kites, and these were a Chinese invention. They date back as far as 3,000 years, where they were made from bamboo and silk in China. The earliest written account of kite flying was about 200 BC. In 478 BC a Chinese Philosopher, Mo Zi, spent three years making a hawk from light wood or bamboo which sailed with the wind. It could fly, but after one day’s trial it was wrecked. Kites were also used in Chinese warfare for years. They carried hideously painted faces, pipes and strings that gave noises to frighten the enemy.

Many attempts to use kites to fly men were also made, the earliest recorded success was very brutal. In AD 550 Emperor Kao Yang overcome his powerful enemies the Thopa and Yuan families. He ordered that the surviving Thopas and Yuan to be fitted out with bamboo-mat wings and cast from the top of the Tower of the Golden phoenix. All died. Other captives were attached to kites cut out in the form of owls and launched from the tower. Only one of the captives survived after flying 2.5 Km. Later that survivor, named Yuan Huang-Thou was starved to death. The Chinese also tried to produce flying machines. In the book Pao Phu Tzu, dated AD 320, Ko Hung states: “Some have made flying cars with wood, using ox-leather straps fastened to returning blades to set the machines in motion”. He is clearly describing rotating blades attached to a spinning axle and driven by a (leather) belt that is a rotor top the principal of which underlie the modern-day helicopter. It seems that the system worked because flying cars had been used. The machine, known as “bamboo dragonfly”, is still used today as a child’s toy.

In the West, the ancient Greek engineer, Hero of Alexandria, worked with air pressure and steam to create sources of power. One experiment that he developed was the aeolipile, which used jets of steam to create rotary motion. The importance of the aeolipile is that it marks the start of engine invention - engine created movement will later prove essential in the history of flight.

Bathing

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.

The first issue we need to address here, is the "Muslim" that Paul Vallely is referring to. His name was Sake Dean Mahomed and he was not a Muslim, but a convert to Christianity.Born to Muslim parents in 1759, He converted to Christianity and married the Anglo-Irish gentlewoman, Jane Daly, in an Anglican ceremony in 1786 (long before opening "Mahomed's Indian Vapour Baths" in 1821). Two of his children (Amelia and Henry) were also baptised into the Anglican faith. Also worthy of mention is the fact that Islam is not the only religion which dictates rules on personal cleanliness. The Jews too have rules governing hygiene.

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.

Speculation has linked some Egyptian illustrations with distillation, but the earliest evidence for its invention so far is a distillation apparatus and terra-cotta perfume containers recently identified in the Indus Valley (pre-Islamic Pakistan) dating from around 3,000 BC, and Miriam the Prophetess (also known as “Maria the Jewess”) invented the kerotakis, an early still dated around the 1st century AD.The first firm documentary evidence for distillation in the West comes from Greek historian Herodotus' record of the method of distilling turpentine dated 425 BC. Also, the origins of whisky is dated to the 5th century AD, introduced to Ireland by Saint-Patrick (390 – 461 AD), the patron of the Irish.So the Arabs may have improved upon the process of distillation some 3,500 years later, but they most definitely did not invent it.

Four works by Geber are known: Summa perfectionis magisterii (The Sum of Perfection or the Perfect Magistery, 1678), Liber fornacum (Book of Furnaces, 1678), De investigatione perfectionis (The Investigation of Perfection, 1678), and De inventione veritatis (The Invention of Verity, 1678). They are the clearest expression of alchemical theory and the most important set of laboratory directions to appear before the 16th century. Accordingly, they were widely read and extremely influential in a field where mysticism, secrecy, and obscurity were the usual rule."

The crank-shaft

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.

Unfortunately for our ingenious Muslim engineer al-Jazari, the crank-shaft was known to the Chinese of the Han Dynasty. The Han Dynasty lasted from 206 BC to 220 AD. By the 1st century AD cranks were used on Roman medical devices, but it was not until 834 AD where we find proof of the crank in Europe. A picture in a graphic codex of a man sharpening a sword on a grindstone turned by a crank. 206 BC to 834 AD is certainly a lot earlier than when Paul Vallely claims a 12th century Muslim invented 'one of the most important mechanical inventions in the history of humankind'.

Piston technology was also used by Hero of Alexandria in the 1st century AD with the creation of the worlds first steam-powered engine- the aeolipile, more than a thousand years before al-Jazari. (please refer to Invention 4 - Flying for further details.) In his works "Pneumatica" and "Automata" he also described over a hundred machines and automata, including mechanical singing birds, puppets, a fire engine, a wind organ (please refer to Invention 11 - The windmill for further details), and a coin-operated machine, so if anyone deserves the title given to al-Jazari by Paul Vallely as the "father of robotics" its Hero of Alexandria. It must also be noted that Hero's works "Mechanica" (in three books) survive only in their Arabic translations, so the Muslims had access to all this pre-Islamic genious, yet writing a factually accurate article on Islamic achievements seems to have proved too much for some.

And what of the Combination Lock, did al-Jazari invent it? Again, the answer is an emphatic 'no'. The earliest known combination lock was unearthed in a Roman period tomb in Kerameikos, Athens. The ancient Chinese were also responsible for the creation of some of the earliest key-operated padlocks and beautiful letter-combination padlocks.

Quilting

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.

It is interesting that the author states himself that it is "not clear whether it was invented in the Muslim world", yet still chose to include quilting as an Islamic invention. However, the evidence against quilting being a Muslim invention is very clear, though it may have come to Europe through the middle East. The actual origins of quilting remains unknown, but its history can so far be traced to ancient China and Egypt as long ago as 3,400 BC with the discovery of a quilted mantle on a carved ivory figure of a Pharaoh of the Egyptian First Dynasty. Moreover, in 1924 archaeologists discovered a quilted floor covering in Mongolia. The estimated age somewhere between the 1st century BC to the 2nd century AD. There are also numerous references to quilts in literature and inventories of estates, and more recently in September 2007 an ancient male mummy was discovered in Xinjiang- China, wrapped in a cotton quilt.

Architecture

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 domebuilding 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.

When it comes to revolutionary architectural inventions, nothing is greater than the creation of concrete, a material perfected by the Romans. This enabled them to erect buildings that would have been impossible to construct using the traditional stone post-and-lintel system. This development made possible the construction of the amphitheatres, baths and hillside temples of the Roman world.With that said and done, although the pointed arch only came into general use in the 13th century, it was in fact the Assyrians (not the 'Muslims') who first used it as early as 722 BC.

As for the 'Islamic' techniques of domebuilding; the best example of a “Dome” in the ancient world is the Pantheon in Rome, built almost 500 years before Islam in 118 - 135 AD by Apollodorus of Damascus and again only made possible through the concrete mixture perfected by the Romans. Originally a temple to the Roman deities, it has been a Christian church since the 7th century. It is an important and impressive feat of design, a building which after almost 2,000 years of continuous use has its original roof intact. The dome has a span of 43.2 metres (142 feet). It remained as the largest dome in the world until the 15th century construction of the Florence Cathedral (1420-36).

Instruments

More than a thousand years before al-Zahrawi, the Greek and Roman physicians in the Classical World had access to a variety of surgical instruments. This is known through several ancient texts which give brief descriptions and also from a 1887 find in the ruins of Pompeii. A house that belonged to a Greek surgeon in 79 AD was identified by its large stores of surgical equipment numbering over a hundred. These medical instruments, which are now on display in museums around the world, were all available to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (460 – 370 BC) who lived more than a thousand years before Islam, and many of them in a similar form are still being used today. These instruments include a variety of scalpels, Hooks, Uvula Crushing Forceps, Bone Drills, Bone Forceps, Catheters and Bladder Sounds, Vaginal Speculum and even a Portable Medicine Chest to carry them in.[43] It was also the Greek physician and medical researcher Claudius Galenus (129 – 217 AD) someone who greatly influenced Western medical science, who first used catgut to close wounds, and not al-Zahrawi. In fact "Muslim" physician Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) 700 years later (920 AD) used a pig product.The actions of a pious Muslim, we're sure.

As for the circulation of the blood, it may have been described by Muslim medic Ibn Nafis 300 years before William Harvey, but the Chinese Book of Medicine describes this 1,600 years before Ibn Nafis.

The article also alleges that Muslim doctors first developed hollow needles to suck cataracts from the eye, and anaesthetics of opium and alcohol mixes. This in not true. Cataract surgery has been performed for many centuries. The earliest reference to cataract surgery was written by the Hindu surgeon Susruta in manuscripts dating from the 5th century BC. In Rome, archaeologists found surgical instruments used to treat cataract dating back to the 1st and 2nd century AD. Hollow needles were used to break up the cataract and remove it with suction.Anaesthetics of opium and alcohol mixes were used both by the ancient Chinese and Romans. Greek physician, pharmacologist and botanist Pedanius Dioscorides (40 - 90 AD) in his work Materia Medica (one of the most influential herbal books in history) referred to the taking of an alcoholic extract before an operation. This would suggest that it was typical for the surgeons of ancient Rome to decrease pain of an operation by giving their patients sedative drugs.

The windmill

The windmill was not invented in the year 634 for a Persian Caliph. Although the Arabs invaded Persia in 634 AD, contrary to the articles claims, there was no Caliph in Persia at that time, he was in Medina, Saudi Arabia. Caliph Abu Bakr died early that year and Umar ibn al-Khattab took over. Fīrūz (Abu-Lu'lu'ah), the Arab-owned non-Muslim slave, who in 644 AD assassinated Caliph Umar in the mosque at Medina, is described by Islamic sources as a Persian builder of windmills. Therefore, the construction of windmills was an already established craft in Persia, pre-dating the presence of Islam.

If we look to the history behind the development of windmills, the first rotary mills were discovered in Catal Hayuk in Turkey and existed 8,000 years ago, while the first windmills were developed much later to automate the tasks of grain-grinding and water-pumping. One of the earliest watermills mentioned can be found in 1st century BC Greek writings, where a watermill was called a hydraletēs, but because of the heavy use of slave labour we do not find the first archeological evidence of watermills until the 4th and 5th century AD. The earliest mention of a type of windmill can be found in the book Pneumatica written by a 1st century AD writer called Hero, in it he describes the creation of a type of windpowered organ. The idea was never worked out however and we don't find the earliest-known design of the vertical axis system until developed in Persia about 500 - 900 AD. China, is also often claimed as the birthplace of the windmill. The belief that it was invented in China more than 2,000 years ago is widespread and may be accurate, but the earliest actual documentation of a Chinese windmill was in 1219 AD by the Chinese statesman Yehlu Chhu-Tshai.

The fountain pen

The history of the fountain pen cannot begin otherwise than with the quill pen. The quill pen was used for the writings of Egyptian kings 4,000 years ago. They most often used a goose feather carved into a sharp tip and dipped into ink of vegetable origin. Though the first pencil was invented by Conrad Gessner In 1567, it remained like this until the end of the 18th century when the metal pen was invented. Daniel Schwenter wrote about the idea of creating a fountain pen in his Delicia Physic-Mathematicae in 1636 , efforts to manufacture a pen with its own ink supply began in the year 1656. For example, Samuel Pepys had one in the year 1663. It functioned in such a way that a small pipe above the tip of the feather was filled with ink by means of a small piston. But a slightly more practically usable pen came to the world in the 19th century. A fountain pen which functioned on the same principle (a pen with a piston) was created by the inventor Folsch in 1809. Later in 1931, László Bíró presented the first ballpoint pen at the Budapest world fair, the ballpoint pen was designed to use better ink that would not clog or smear.

Those who claim that the fountain pen was invented in AD 953 by a Muslim need to produce both the evidence of a fountain pen, and evidence of the type of ink used.

Carpets

The earliest known carpet was discovered by Russian Professor Rudenko in 1949 during excavations of burial mounds in the Altai Mountains in Siberia. Called the Pazyryk rug, it dates from the fifth century B.C.and is now kept in the Hermitage museum of St. Petersburg. It was preserved from decay, due to water seeping into the burial mound and freezing. The advanced weaving technique used in the Pazyryk carpet indicates a long history of evolution and experience in this art. Most experts believe that the Pazyryk carpet is a late achievement of at least one thousand years of technique evolution and history. Evidence suggests that some forms of rug-weaving were used in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Middle East and Asia about 4,000 years ago. Therefore, the carpet is a pre-Islamic invention.

What of the West and the flooring being referred to by Paul Vallely? The Colosseum in Rome which was completed in 80 AD had wooden (not earthy) flooring. In fact, the typical Roman home as early as the 2nd century BC had mosaic flooring, as found in the "House of the Tragic Poet" in Pompeii, Italy.[80][81] The Romans also made use of rugs on the floors and the walls of their palaces. In 47 BC When the Egyptians banished Queen Cleopatra from Egypt, replacing her with her brother, she had herself delivered to the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar, smuggled inside a rolled up carpet. Their love for carpets was so great that many considered them to be more valuable than money and they even used them to pay their taxes.

The modern cheque

The ancient Romans are believed to have used an early form of cheque known as praescriptiones in the first century BC, and the saqq (or 'sakk', which developed into the modern word 'cheques') system being referred to by Paul Vallely was a 3rd century pre-Islamic innovation of the Persian Sassanid Empire. Modern cheques need paper to be written, so clues to the invention of cheques can be traced following the lead of the invention of paper. Closely related is also the history of money and banking.

Paper is thought to have been invented in China 1st century BC. It was kept as a secret for 5 centuries and went to Japan in AD 610. It was not used only for writing and books (The Chinese are also responsible for the invention of printing, possibly between the 4th and 7th century AD.) but also for making umbrellas, flags, house holds, toilet paper and even amour so strong as to resist arrows. More to the point of cheques, they used it for the first promissory note, the first paper money. The invention was necessitated by the highway men who became so numerous that the merchants were not able to pay their taxes to the state. The state machinery was vital to the Chinese Empire to survive for so many thousand years. The civil servants brought the idea of notes marked with certain value that can be exchanged to gold at the end of the journey. Thus was developed the first cheques in history.