An Invention i can Digg

[Thinkerman]

Pointing the Car Toward Mecca

 

By TERESA RIORDAN

 

November 10, 2003

 

 

HE Koran requires Muslims to pray five times a day while facing Mecca, the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad. Traditionally muezzins climb the minarets of mosques to call out prayer time, but in the modern world the devout are not always within earshot.

 

Frank Deworetzki, an inventor for Mannesmann, in Frankfurt, offers a solution. Two weeks ago Mr. Deworetzki patented a navigational system for automobiles that not only shows the driver where he or she is headed but also shows the direction of Mecca at all times.

 

 

Moreover, the system can be programmed to play prayer calls at the appropriate times. During Ramadan, the month of daytime religious fasting, which begins today in the United States, the system alerts drivers to the time of sunrise and sunset, wherever they may be. Mr. Deworetzki could not be reached for comment, and the system does not seem to be available yet. It is patent No.6,633,813.

 

David M. Thimmig, the patent lawyer who shepherded the application through the patent office for Siemens, which owns Mannesmann, said the patent was much broader than simply a way to know the location of Mecca.

 

''You can use this technology to know where your grandmother's house is at all times if you want to,'' said Mr. Thimmig, who is with Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw of Chicago.

 

Still, with more than a billion Muslims worldwide, the number of potential consumers who want to keep track of Mecca is much larger than those who want to remember where grandmother's house is.

 

Mr. Deworetzki is not the only inventor trying to marry technology with Islam and in the process tap into the large Muslim consumer market. Last month LG Electronics, the second-largest mobile phone maker in Korea, after Samsung, began selling its new LG-G5300 phone, which costs about $250 and includes a compass and location tracking software. Even when a global positioning system is not available, the phone displays the direction of the ancient holy city Mecca, which is in modern Saudi Arabia.

 

Other inventors are seeking patents on similar concepts. Jean Ciechanowiecki of Weston, Fla., and Hossein Sazfgar of France have applied for a cellphone that displays Mecca, as have Kiyoshi Hasebe and a team of other Japanese inventors.

 

Less sophisticated devices catering to the Muslim consumer are on the market. Last week a Canadian merchant was auctioning an Arabic Traveling Prayer Chime on eBay. The starting bid for the chime, which plugs into the cigarette lighter outlet of a car and plays a prayer, was $14.99.

 

Abdelhamid I. Sabra, a professor in the department of the history of science at Harvard, said historically religious authorities often opposed innovative thought in the Islamic world.

 

From the 9th century to the 14th century, however, Islamic mathematicians were obsessed with figuring out how to calculate the position of Mecca from different locations. In the course of this quest, they proposed a variety of novel trigonometric solutions.

 

For a medieval historian like Professor Sabra, the new technology puts a modern gloss on age-old knowledge. ''Mathematically, this problem was solved centuries ago,'' he said.

[Xafsa]

Who would have thought that muslims would finally have some sort of effect in the high tech world of today. Its progress...The cell phone idea would really be usefull.