While it is true that Lebanon is a small country, covering only 10,452 square kilometers and with a population of no more than 5 million, the "Land of the Cedars" has been known throughout ancient and modern times for its inventors and emigrants. It is well known, of course, that the Phoenicians, the ancient residents of Syria and Lebanon, invented the alphabet and spread it to the world. Their boats traveled to Europe and Africa, and according to some theories, the Phoenicians may have even been the first to cross the Atlantic and discover the American continent.

In the modern era, the Lebanese began to emigrate in significant numbers at the beginning of the 18th century, primarily to Europe, the Americas and Africa. Some Lebanese researchers put the number of Lebanese emigrants, including their children and grandchildren, at between 11 and 16 million. These emigrants have included some prominent intellectuals, scholars and inventors. One of the most prominent of these was the thinker and writer Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883-1931), who became popular in the West as a poet and painter after emigrating to the United States and publishing his books in English. He is most known in the West for The Prophet (1923) and is the best-selling poet after William Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu.

Among the most prominent Lebanese scientists is Hassan Kamel al-Sabah (1894-1935), who was born in the city of Nabatieh, in southern Lebanon. He has dozens of inventions registered to him in Australia, Europe, Japan and the United States. Sabah is also the author of several mathematical theories in electrical engineering, earning him the moniker "Edison of the Orient." Like Gibran, he emigrated to Boston, for university studies. He began work in 1921 as an engineer with General Electric. In 1927, Sabah joined the General Electric Company in New York state, which is where he would develop many of his 71 inventions. One of his inventions was a device for image transfer, developed in 1931. This technology, still used today in photoelectric imaging, was the foundation for modern cinema, in particular CinemaScope, and was used in TV as well. Sabah also invented a device for converting solar energy into continuous electrical energy.

Peter Brian Medawar (1915-1987) was a British doctor of Lebanese descent. In 1953, Medawar discovered that injecting mice embryos during the development stage with cells taken from the tissues of adult mice enabled the young mice to successfully accept a patch of skin from the older mice. This discovery, involving acquired immunological tolerance, paved the way for research aimed at reducing instances of the human body rejecting transplanted organs. Medawar and the Australian scientist Sir Frank Burnett received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1960 for their discovery of acquired immunological tolerance.