EGYPT: At 2am sharp during his journey to Nuweiba, a bus driver was surprised by an alarm warning of a fire inside the bus. The driver pulled to the side of the road, and in a minute, the fire had extinguished itself. The fire wasn't extinguished as "coincidence" or "magic and sorcery”: it was extinguished thanks to a purely Egyptian invention called the alarm and automatic fire extinguisher device for cars. The brains of Egypt's inventors didn't rust despite systematic attempts to neglect and eliminate them. They haven't lost hope that their inventions will be adopted, and that their dreams will come true and benefit society. But inventors were shocked after the revolution because they thought things would change after the fall of the former regime. In reality, things are still the same. The story of the alarm and automatic fire extinguisher device goes back to 1993, when the Egyptian auto-technician Ayman Awad Zayed decided to develop an electromechanic device to extinguish fires that break out in cars and buses. Zayed said it took him ten years, and he even quit his job in Saudi Arabia, to complete his invention. It was finally completed in 2003. Zayed, the recipient of a local patent in 2003 and an international patent in 2005, said, "I spent a lot of money on this invention. I settled my pension early to be totally free for my invention. Funding was my main problem, and when I signed a contract with Helwan Company, the terms were that I had to pay the larger part of the expenses, while the company was able sell the device in return for small profit share for me. The main problems that face the inventors in Egypt are a lack of funding, lack of social awareness of these inventions' importance, and finally, the banality of media.”
