Looking around Riyadh several years ago, you could not have missed the air-conditioning units in homes and offices. The number of buildings with the naturally cool designs developed centuries ago were rare. But unknown architects of Arabia, using special non-conducting heat materials, jalousies, solar reflective blinds and interior draft corridors, created cool living spaces with no equal today for economy and efficiency in hot weather. The same state-of-the-art quality applies to another ancient technology, the qanats: underground water tunnels developed by ancient Iranian engineers for bringing water from the highlands for use in agriculture. Still another past technological breakthrough, the vertical windmill developed in Egypt, refined by Afghan and Iranian Muslims, remains at the forefront of windmill technology today.
There are a number of innovations from ancient Islamic societies which have today been rediscovered and adopted as "advanced" or "state-of-the-art" in Western countries. Among them are herbal pharmaceuticals, musical instruments, banking practices and metallurgy. But many ancient inventions are discarded in their underdeveloped home countries. They neglect traditional artisans and craft workers for mass-imported Western technology in electronics, domestic appliances and transportation.
But some of the discarded traditional technologies may be potentially more efficient, while far less expensive, than modern products of Western technology.
In the 1970s, businesswoman Abby Rockefeller of the wealthy American family, announced to friends in Boston that she was starting a waste recycling company to replace the domestic water closet. Her idea struck many who knew her as eccentric and risky. The company promoted chemical treatment of human waste in a contraption that looked like a large waterless toilet. Over the last few years, her idea has not met much domestic demand beyond the ecologically minded, but it has been used by many municipalities and schools to decrease pollution from burning, burying or dumping human waste. The savings from recycling have been large and the innovation has reduced environmental stress. But was the innovation new? No, it had been developed in the Indus Valley millennia ago, the oldest example found in Pakistan, c. 2500 B.C.
One of my concerns is that a slavish adoption of modern Western technology in developing countries will prove too expensive for them. Not only that, the imported technology will divert resources and attention from things based in its history which could lead to far cheaper technological advances. In his book, "The Sources of Innovation" (1988), MIT Professor Eric von Hippel, shows that users of present technology who are used to it are seldom able to generate novel product concepts that conflict with its use. In discussing the inferiority of US semiconductor firms, Hippel finds that many leading-edge US innovative firms buy their equipment from foreign firms and so end up supporting the foreign innovators. The reason that US semiconductor firms cannot seem to catch up in order to surpass the foreign ones is that the US firms lose "lead time" and "rapid access," he writes, "to state-of-the-art user-developed" innovations as US users learn and copy the advanced imported semiconductors. Thus, Hippel concludes that when "US semiconductor buyers are forced to turn to foreign sources — often competitors — for state-of-the-art components... (they) lose competitive advantage thereby."
At any given time, Western imported technology seldom improves the lifestyle of more than an elite in a developing country. And unless Egypt or Indonesia, for example, begins to export automobiles and jet engines, which is unlikely, the former will continue to beg for hard currency to pay for imported automobiles and jet engines. Nothing that they can sell to the US or Japan will be as expensive as what those two sell to Egypt and Indonesia. We can apply this lesson to just about any of the countries outside the G-8. Does that mean that non-G-8 countries have no possibility of producing goods of greater value than expensive G-8 country imports? No. But first the countries have to begin protecting the cultural base that makes them unique, for in that uniqueness lies what can advance technical and artistic innovation. Cultural treasures and artifacts — tourist attractions to the foreigner — have no imitators or competitors so the preserved ancient sites and cultural artifacts are always state-of-the-art in economic value. So, as we say in the West, don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Protect your ancient technologies — if not with trade secrets and patents, at least with trademarks and copyrights. Study past technology, experiment and innovate.
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(American journalist Carl Senna is the author of "Colin Powell: A Man of War and Peace," The Black Press, and the article "Mothers of Invention" in the August 2002 issue of Opportunity Journal magazine, published by the National Urban League.)
Arab News Features 2 January 2003
