Hassan Kamal Al-Sabbah is one of the most undervalued innovators in history. Sadly, some of the reasons for this may be related to the fact that he is from Lebanon.
Hassan Kamal Al-Sabbah was a mathematician, electrical and electronics research engineer, and inventor who was born in Nabatieh, Lebanon, in 1895. He attended the American University of Beirut to further his education. At the American University of Beirut and the Imperial College of Damascus, Syria, he was a professor of mathematics.
In the US, he carried out a significant amount of research at MIT and the University of Illinois. With more than 70 US and international patents for his work, he was a hugely influential figure in his field. Despite everything he accomplished, not many people are aware of him. Here are some areas that he had an impact on that you may not have known about.
Prior to enrolling at the University of Illinois in 1923, he traveled to the United States in 1921 and briefly studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He began working in the vacuum tube section of the General Electric Company’s Engineering Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, in 1923. There, he conducted mathematical and experimental research, primarily on rectifiers and inverters, for which he was awarded 43 patents. There were allegedly new developments in television transmission among the patents.
Space
The majority of Al-Sabbah’s work appears to have been directed toward the space industry. This is quite a remarkable fact considering that it took nearly 40 years after his tragic death in a car accident in 1935 for a man to set foot on the moon. With 27 patents in the space industry, he had a significant area of expertise, particularly in solar power. With the recognition of global warming, solar power has grown to be of utmost importance. Al-Sabbah experimented with solar cells that are now used in space exploration as prototypes. This is an illustration of his extraordinary influence on invention decades later.
Electric Cars
Hassan Kamal Al-Sabbah has patents for transforming automobile circuitry to create early designs for electric cars as part of his ongoing research into solar energy and its applications in space. Again, his early concepts have proven to be incredibly prescient for the modern era, where electric cars are being used to replace gasoline-powered vehicles. Al-Sabbah conducted experiments on his own vehicle in an effort to practically power a car using solar energy. This was a very early attempt at a topic that is now the focus of major corporations like Tesla.
Arc-Welding
Arc welding is essential in heavy industries like the construction of wind farms, ships, tanks, turbos, and other heavy-duty structures. A rectifying system created by Al-Sabbah was crucial in the creation of the arc welding machine. The use of electricity to heat metal to the proper temperature for welding it to the other components of heavy items is a really important development that makes it possible to weld large pieces of metal needed for heavy industries. This turns out to be something of an obsession for Al-Sabbah.
During the Second World War, industrial developers used Al-Sabbah’s techniques to develop the necessary welding techniques for the extremely large-scale production of vehicles and turbochargers that powered the corresponding war efforts.
Television
Al-Sabbah’s innovations and patents, specifically 5 of them, had a significant impact on the world of televisions and screens in general, which is a departure from the heavy, industry-oriented worlds of space travel and heavy instrument arc welding. In fact, Al-Sabbah’s patents had such a significant impact that they served as the foundation for the now-ubiquitous LCD (liquid crystal display) screens.
His contributions to televisual transmission directly influenced the development of aircraft-mounted military LCDs, which are used to display information in incredibly fine detail. All of this is related to his work on the cathode ray tube, a subject matter for which two of the patents were reserved specifically. Since his screens had many more pixels than typical black and green filters, the color detail was much more vivid. Some claim that modern television wouldn’t exist without Al-Sabbah.
It is extremely sad that Al-Sabbah’s tragic accident in 1935 took him away from his inventions at such a young age. He was killed in a car accident at Lewis, which is close to Elizabeth Town in New York. But his influence and legacy endure because so much of his work has proven to be so extremely important to so many different industries over the past century. It is hoped that other inventors will be inspired by his distinctive passions and strive to match his level of productivity and dedication to invention. It is certainly worth honoring his legacy because he is directly responsible for so many things that we now take for granted.
