1.
...coffee was discovered by an arab named Khalid in southern Ethiopia, and 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 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. he worked out, the smaller the hole, the better the picture, and set up the first Camera Obscura (from the Arab word 'qamara' for a dark or private room).
3.
...the first man to shift physics from a philosophical activity to an experimental one was the 10th-century Muslim mathematician, astronomer and physicist Ibn al-Haitham.
4.
...the game chess 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.
5.
...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 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.
6.
...Washing and bathing are religious requirements for Muslims, which is perhaps why they perfected the recipe for soap which we still use today. It was the Arabs who combined vegetable oils with sodium hydroxide and aromatics such as thyme oil.
7.
...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.
8.
...Distillation, 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.
9.
...Jabir Ibn Hayyan, the founder of modern chemistry, discovered sulphuric and nitric acid around the year 800, and also invented the alembic still, giving the world intense rosewater and other perfumes.
10.
...the crank-shaft was created in the 12th century by an ingenious Muslim engineer called al-Jazari to raise water for irrigation. 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 engine of vehicles.
11.
...al-Jazari's 1206 Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices shows he 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.
12.
...quilting came to the West via the Crusaders, who saw it used by Saracen warriors.
13.
...Henry V's castle architect was a Muslim. Europe's castles were adapted to copy the Islamic world's - with arrow slits, battlements, a barbican and parapets.
14.
...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.
15.
...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.
16.
...a 10th century Muslim surgeon called al-Zahrawi 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.
17.
...in the 13th century, a Muslim medic named Ibn Nafis described the circulation of the blood, 300 years before William Harvey discovered it.
18.
...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.
19.
...the windmill was invented in 634 for a Persian caliph and was used to grind corn and draw up water for irrigation. It was 500 years before the first windmill was seen in Europe.
20.
...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.
21.
...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.
22.
...Algebra was named after Muslim mathematician, al-Khwarizmi's 825CE 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.
23.
...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.
24.
...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 .
25.
...thanks to the advanced weaving techniques of medieval Muslims, new tinctures from Islamic chemistry and highly developed sense of pattern and arabesque, carpets were regarded as part of Paradise. In contrast, Europe's floors were distinctly earthly, until Arabian and Persian carpets were introduced.
26.
...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.
27.
...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.
28.
...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.
29.
...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.
30.
...way back in the 10th century Muslim doctor Al-Zahrawi pioneered plastic surgery. In fact it was his practice of using ink to mark the incisions are now a routine standard procedure.
....i bet you didn't...Look out for the 'Did You Know' Posters around campus!
More info on Muslim World Heritage can be found on:
www.muslimheritage.com
and
www.1001inventions.com
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