Castles in the Air, the Flying Carpet, and the Ring of 'At Your Service'

... As though you were in a world peopled by legends, jinn-maidens, and fables ... the vast imagination of the East, which the modern West makes real in a reality that is like imagination, or beyond imagination ...

And as though the world were spinning you round in enchanted spirals, as you read this article by the man of letters Mr. Kamal al-Yaziji on what he saw in the land of wonders and marvels ...
"The Editors"

The traditional understanding of "the New World" is that it is the world newly discovered — the world of Columbus. Yet whoever has had the good fortune to visit those lands, and gives himself over to contemplating their new civilization in general, and their mechanical innovations in particular, is struck at once by the thought that the name has acquired, across the ages, a truer meaning: that it is a world of a new civilization.

The visitor arrives in New York City and is seized by its towering buildings, its suspended bridges, its elevated roads. He marvels at the tunnels that burrow beneath the earth, and at the tube-roads that carpet the riverbeds and take the waters for their blanket. He is astonished at the mechanical inventions that ease labor, spare effort, and save a great deal of time.

Indeed it seems to the visitor, in the flood of his amazement, that he is in a city planned by Solomon the Wise and built by a company of jinn, or that its designer drew his imagination from the book of the Thousand and One Nights. For wherever he turns he sees enduring signs of that splendid imagination, and wherever he faces he beholds its wonders in solid form: the castles standing in the air, the gliding flying carpet, the enchanted secret doors, the marvelous cap of invisibility, and the astounding ring of "At Your Service" — all of these the visitor sees with his own eyes and touches with his own hand.

The Castles in the Air:

These are what are known as skyscrapers. The tallest of them exceed a hundred stories, many reach sixty and seventy, and few among them fall below fifty. Whoever looks out from their lofty windows on a cloudy day imagines himself in a palace whose foundations rest upon the clouds and whose summits pierce the very heart of the sky; and perhaps seconds pass over him in which he does not doubt that he is in one of the palaces of the "Thousand and One Nights."

The Flying Carpet:

It appears in many signs, among them: the bridges suspended above the broad rivers, and the roads raised upon columns, threading their way among the huge buildings. Among them too are the stairways that move upward and downward, and the elevators that stitch together dozens of stories, rising and descending. Of this kind also are the belts that glide among the various work departments in the great factories, carrying the goods still in the making from one worker to another, so that each may perform on them his own particular task; and so on until they reach the packing department. If the observer were to set aside the scientific, mechanical side of it, he would see in all of these the flying carpet, gliding in every direction.

The Enchanted Doors:

Of this kind are the cross-set arms that bar the passageways leading to the stations of the electric trains that run in the belly of the earth. The rider has no need to buy a ticket for the journey; it is enough for him to drop the appointed coin into a slot beside the barring arm, whereupon he pushes the arm and it gives way. And as he passes, another arm at the outlet locks behind him, and it will not yield to the following rider until the fare has been collected in the manner described.

Among the things with enchanted doors is the voting apparatus. The voter, after establishing his identity, enters a booth resembling a telephone booth, and the door closes behind him by a mechanical motion. There he sits at a small table and writes the names of his candidates on a card, then inserts the card into a box before him and turns a knob at his right. At once the card disappears inside the box and the door of the voting booth opens of itself, announcing that the act of voting is finished. In this way the freedom of election is safeguarded and its results kept exact. Moreover, in many offices of the great companies there are doors that open of themselves before the passerby and close behind him, merely upon his crossing an electric beam that spans the corridor. These doors have been enchanted by the electric current, and they have become more wondrous than the "Sesame, open; Sesame, shut" of the "Thousand and One Nights."

The Cap of Invisibility:

This wondrous cap appears most often in the mechanical saleswomen: the seller of refreshments, the seller of cigarettes, the seller of postage stamps, the seller of roasted seeds and sweets. These are metal boxes behind whose glass fronts appear samples of the goods, and on the right-hand side is a slot the size of the coin equal in value to the goods. The purchase is completed when the buyer feeds the box the coin, then presses a knob, and the machine casts out the desired article. The strange thing about these devices is that they are so exact that they reject counterfeit coins, and so upright that they return the money when the goods have run out. And besides all this, they neither cheat nor haggle nor hoard. Some of them will change a large coin and return to the buyer the balance of his account, whole and undiminished. These devices undertake to deliver the goods to the buyer once the price is collected — but the real seller has put on the cap of invisibility.

The Ring of "At Your Service":

"At your service — your slave stands before you." Such is the language of certain mechanical devices: the fare-collecting telephone and telegraph, and the corrector of examinations. The coin telephone is an automatic telephone apparatus fixed to a small box in which are three slots for three different coins: five cents, ten, and a quarter dollar. If the call is within the city, the speaker need only drop in the appointed coin and register the desired number in the manner familiar from the automatic telephone, and he is connected at once with the other party. If the connection cannot be made, the coin is returned immediately. If the call is with another city, the speaker connects with the exchange office and asks the clerk to connect him with a certain number in the other city. If the connection can be made, the clerk asks the speaker to drop in the appointed fee, and he drops it in full: quarters and tens and fives; and then the connection is made and the conversation proceeds.

As for the mechanical correction of examinations, it requires that the examination be written on special papers, and that the questions be such as can be answered with "yes" or "no." In answering these questions the student has only to mark, opposite the question, in the column of right or of wrong, a black dot with a special pencil; and the corrector has only to feed these papers, one by one, into an apparatus prepared to match the correct pattern of the answers. Wherever the black mark is out of its place, there appears, in the place where it ought to be, a sign showing that an error has occurred. After that, the corrector has only to count the errors and set down the grade the examination deserves. And so one who knows nothing at all of the subject of the examination can correct the papers without falling into any error. Thus the telephone worker, the telegraph clerk, and the corrector of examinations all do their work under the guidance of the "Ring of At Your Service" — and so they are "slaves standing before you."

This is a little of the much that could be told of such inventions. Every day, in the American lands, a new sign of the signs of the Thousand and One Nights comes true, a new wonder of its wonders is brought forth, and one of its fantasies takes on flesh.

Kamal al-Yaziji
The American University of Beirut