Modern Science at Your Service

The famous inventor and great mathematician Muhammad Hasan Kamel al-Sabbah is counted in the front rank of the men of science who worked, and expended prodigious mental effort, to realize the dream that many had dreamed: the transmission of images of persons and things through the ether across vast distances — the method that scientists have agreed to call television. Perhaps it is well to say, on this occasion, that the method conceived by the mighty mind of our inventor, the late Muhammad Hasan Kamel al-Sabbah of Jabal Amel, during his time as chief of engineers of the General Electric Company in New York State, was the best method ever devised for television — this on the testimony of the great men of science throughout the inhabited world. And who knows? The television apparatus now in use in America, Britain, and elsewhere may well be built on al-Sabbah's method and not on that of other scientists. To verify this matter and clear up its obscurities, one of the specialists in this art from among the sons of this country — if we have specialists — would have to undertake a precise study and a thorough scientific inquiry, which neither I nor others who know but little about television are able to carry out. There is no room to examine the question here except by way of a reminder and a rousing of ambitions.

As for television, its nature may be defined and described in a sentence or two as follows. Imagine that you wish to speak to a friend or a relative far away from you. If he has a telephone, you go to your own telephone, or to some other, and ask the exchange to connect you with the telephone of the person you wish to address. Your request is soon answered, and the two of you converse with ease. This method of conversing, however, has several drawbacks, chief among them: the slowness of the connection, since you must often wait several minutes before you can speak to your friend; and the impossibility of your speaking by telephone in secrecy. Among the drawbacks of the ordinary telephone, too, is that you cannot see your companion, since you hear only his voice — and what difficulties that entails is plain enough.

But television has come to make good these deficiencies. It has become possible for you to speak to

a person and see him while he is hundreds of miles distant from you, whenever you wish and in the quickest possible time, and with the assurance that no third ear is listening in on the conversation between you, if you both so desire. All this is done by means of the television apparatus in your possession and a similar apparatus in the possession of the person you wish to address. In that case you have only to switch on the apparatus and turn a certain knob in it, just as you turn the knobs of a radio set to listen to the broadcast of one of the radio stations. But television has two essential advantages over wireless broadcasting: first, every television apparatus is at once a receiver and a transmitter; second, by means of the television apparatus you can see persons and things.

... And modern science never ceases to press forward. Every day it registers a new discovery in the various domains of nature and of life.

Applied science aims before all else at man's comfort and at providing the means of livelihood. In medicine it fights disease; in nature it confronts her dominion and subjects it to the will of reason; in society, in economics, and the like, it works toward organization, and toward guiding individuals and communities to security, tranquility, and sufficiency.

Modern science was not content, for example, with shortening the distances between the corners of the globe to a degree that formerly would never have crossed the mind; it labors hard, as well, to provide travelers with every means of comfort.

At the top of this text are views of a modern train that lacks nothing — as if it were a complete house.