Islamic Inventors changed the World

How Islamic 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.

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.  

TheArabic Qahwa- قهوة عربية became the Turkish qahwa 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.

 Taken from Published: 11 March 2006  
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article350594.ece