Camera
It may be surprising to learn the Muslims helped with the development of the camera hundreds of years before Europe produced it. It was thanks to the great scientist Ibn Haytham (often latinized to Alhazen) who built the foundation of the camera. So next time you take a selfie thank the Muslim scientist Ibn Haytham.
The Book of Optics
Ibn Haytham was a polymath born in the city of Basra, Iraq. He lived during the Khilafah (Caliphate) of the Abbasid's. He used to study in the largest library in the world, the بيت الحكمة (House of Wisdom) in Baghdad. He studied and used the scientific method which allowed him to soar in the field of optics. He published a book called كتاب المناظير (The Book of Optics) in
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which he disproved the theory of the Greeks that stated light came out of your eyes then bounced off an object and came back to your eye. He studied the eye carefully by looking at the work of previous scholars and through dissection; he came to the conclusion that light enters the eye, becomes focused then gets projected back into the eye. To prove this he built the pinhole camera (picture above)centuries before the cameras was built. He realized that the smaller the pinhole size, the sharper the image quality was. Which give him the ability to build cameras that were incredibly accurate and sharp when capturing an image.
The Europeans translated his book into Latin which allowed later European scholars to build the same pinhole camera as Ibn Haytham had. Through this book they were able to develop telescopes, glasses for your eyes, and the modern day camera.