Sometime in the late 1980s, an engineer in Erlangen heard a song coming down the hallway and decided it was going to ruin his life for the next few years. The song was “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega, sung without any instruments behind it. Karlheinz Brandenburg realized that a bare human voice was the hardest thing in the world to squeeze into a small file, which made it the perfect thing to test against. He listened to it thousands of times.
What came out of that work at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits was the MP3. The file extension itself was settled on in 1995, and Vega has been called the mother of the MP3 ever since.
So every playlist you have ever assembled traces back to a research lab in a mid-sized Franconian city, and to one woman singing about a diner in New York.
Most people never learn that. The same goes for a surprising amount of what follows.
Sound and Picture
The MP3 is the third time we Germans reinvented how recorded sound gets stored, which nobody planned and nobody particularly noticed.
Emil Berliner was born in Hanover and emigrated to the United States in 1870. In November 1887 he received patents for what he called the gramophone, and the same filing described the flat disc that went with it. Edison had gotten there first with a cylinder, but Berliner’s disc was cheaper to copy, played longer, and cut the groove sideways rather than down into the surface. Records still work that way. He later founded Deutsche Grammophon with his brother Joseph, back in Hanover, and that label is still releasing music today.
Forty years on, Fritz Pfleumer was working in Dresden with paper, powders, and magnets. In 1928 he patented a strip of paper coated with iron oxide, which is the first magnetic tape anyone had made. AEG licensed it and showed the Magnetophon K1 at the Berlin radio fair in 1935. Recording studios everywhere ran on that idea for the rest of the century.
Television has a similar shape to it, minus the happy ending for the inventor. On January 6, 1884, a broke student named Paul Nipkow filed for a patent on an “electric telescope,” a spinning disc perforated in a spiral that chopped an image into lines. His fiancée Sophia Colonius paid the fee because he could not. As far as anyone can tell he never built the thing. He quit university the next year for lack of money. Manfred von Ardenne demonstrated the first fully electronic system in 1931, using a cathode ray tube, and mechanical scanning was finished from that moment on.
Two Machines That Changed What People Could Know
Around 1450 in Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg worked out how to cast individual metal letters, arrange them, print from them, and then take the whole thing apart and use the letters again. Printing already existed in Asia. What Gutenberg built was the industrial version, and within fifty years there were presses in every corner of Europe.
The Gutenberg-Museum in Mainz owns two original copies of the forty-two-line Bible, which is about as close to the beginning of mass communication as anybody can get. The museum is between buildings at the moment, so check the address before you go.
Almost five hundred years later, Konrad Zuse was building the other kind of machine in his parents’ apartment in Berlin-Kreuzberg. He had trained as a civil engineer and hated doing the same calculations over and over, so he made something to do them for him. On May 12, 1941, he showed the Z3 to a small group of scientists: a relay-driven box weighing about a ton, working in binary, and freely programmable. That is the first working programmable computer, full stop.
Nobody noticed. There was a war on, no press came, and in December 1943 an air raid destroyed the machine along with the building. Zuse spent years afterward with no proof it had ever existed. If you want to see one, Berlin‘s Deutsches Technikmuseum has a working reconstruction built by his son Horst, and there is another in Hünfeld, where the family firm later set up shop.
Getting Around
The bicycle came out of a disaster on the other side of the planet. When the volcano Tambora erupted in Indonesia in 1815, the ash cooled the whole northern hemisphere, 1816 went down as the year without a summer, harvests failed, and across Central Europe horses were slaughtered because there were no oats left to feed them. Karl von Drais, a forestry official from Karlsruhe, went looking for something that could carry a person without eating anything.
On June 12, 1817, he rode his Laufmaschine (running machine) from Mannheim to Schwetzingen and back, roughly 14 km / 9 mi, in about an hour. Two wheels, a seat, a steerable front, no pedals yet. People laughed at him and he died poor, which happens to a lot of the men on this page.
The car story belongs on my page about German cars, so I will keep it short here. Nicolaus August Otto built the first practical four-stroke engine in 1876, Carl Benz patented the first automobile in Mannheim in 1886, and Bertha Benz proved it worked by driving one to Pforzheim and back two years later without telling him first.
Rudolf Diesel rarely gets his turn in that story, and he should. He filed in February 1892 for an engine that would ignite fuel through sheer compression instead of a spark, then spent five hard years at the Maschinenfabrik in Augsburg (later MAN) turning the theory into iron that actually ran. The 1897 prototype was roughly twice as efficient as anything else available. Ships, trucks, and locomotives still run on the principle. Diesel himself walked onto a ferry crossing the English Channel in September 1913 and was never seen again.
One correction while we are here, because it gets repeated constantly. Mercedes-Benz did not invent the airbag. A Munich tinkerer named Walter Linderer filed the idea in October 1951, and General Motors was selling airbags in the mid-1970s, badly and briefly. What happened in Stuttgart in 1981 was that the S-Class became the first car anywhere to offer a driver’s airbag and a seat belt tensioner working together as one system. That is the achievement, and it is a real one. It is just not the same claim.
Things in the House
Refrigeration got invented for beer. Not as a joke, that is the actual sequence. Brewers wanted to make cold-fermented lager year-round instead of hauling ice into cellars all winter, and Carl von Linde, then teaching in Munich, built them a machine that would do it. His ammonia design of 1876 was the one that worked; the first units went to the Dreher brewery in Trieste and to Spaten in Munich. Everything that keeps your food cold descends from a favor done for the brewing trade. If you like German beer, you are drinking the reason.
Melitta Bentz was a housewife in Dresden who was tired of grounds in her teeth. In 1908 she punched holes in the bottom of a brass pot, tore a sheet of blotting paper out of her son Willy’s school notebook, laid it in, and poured hot water over the coffee. She registered the design in June of that year and started a company in December with seventy-two Reichspfennig (the smallest coin of the day). Her husband quit his job to help; her sons went to work for her. The firm moved to Minden later and still carries her first name.
Artur Fischer grew up in Tumlingen in the Black Forest, now part of Waldachtal, and started out in 1949 by building a camera flash that fired at the same instant as the shutter—because a photographer could not get a decent picture of his daughter indoors. In 1958 came the gray plastic wall plug that sits behind every shelf and mirror in Europe. He filed well over a thousand patents and registered designs across his life, which puts him in Edison’s neighborhood, and he kept going into the office past his ninetieth birthday. :-)
And the gummy bear. Hans Riegel started his company in a laundry room in Bonn in December 1920 with a sack of sugar, a marble slab, a stool, a copper kettle, and a roller. The name is just his own, chopped up: Hans Riegel Bonn. In 1922 he shaped the first fruit gum bear, taller and thinner than today’s, and called it a Tanzbär (dancing bear) after the ones people led around at fairs. His wife Gertrud delivered the day’s production by bicycle.
Work Done in the Lab
On a Friday evening in November 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was working with a vacuum tube in his lab at the university in Würzburg when a coated screen across the room started to glow, even though the tube was shielded. He spent weeks alone with it before telling anyone. The first image he made was of his wife Anna Bertha’s hand, bones and wedding ring both.
He took the first Nobel Prize in Physics for it in 1901, and he refused to patent any of it. He turned down a commercial offer from AEG on the grounds that the discovery belonged to everyone. Hospitals had working equipment within a year. He was born in Lennep, today a district of Remscheid.
Robert Koch, from Clausthal-Zellerfeld in the Harz, did something less visible but arguably bigger. Bacteria had been seen under microscopes for two centuries; nobody had proven that a particular one caused a particular disease. In 1876 Koch did exactly that for anthrax, working in a makeshift lab in his own house, and on March 24, 1882, he stood up in Berlin and announced the organism behind tuberculosis. At the time roughly one in seven people in Germany died of it.
Aspirin is messier. The standard version credits Felix Hoffmann, a young chemist at Bayer in what is now Leverkusen, with producing pure acetylsalicylic acid in August 1897. His colleague Arthur Eichengrün said for the rest of his life that he had directed the work and that Hoffmann had followed instructions. Eichengrün was Jewish. He first made the claim in writing in 1944, from Theresienstadt, where the Nazis had deported him. Bayer has never accepted his account. The German patent office puts it plainly enough: the lone-inventor story does not hold up. Somebody’s name got left off, and we know why it might have been.
One more, quietly enormous. In March 1931, Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll got a two-stage magnified image using electron optics instead of light, which is the working principle of the electron microscope and the reason anyone has ever seen a virus. The Nobel committee got around to Ruska in 1986, fifty-five years later. He was seventy-nine.
The Ones That Came with a Bill
Some of this history is hard to hold in one hand, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Fritz Haber found a way to pull nitrogen out of the air and turn it into ammonia. Carl Bosch scaled it up, and the first plant started running at Oppau near Ludwigshafen in 1913. Synthetic fertilizer came out of it, and by most estimates about half the people alive today are fed because of that process. It is probably the single most consequential invention on this page.
The same man ran the German chemical weapons program in the First World War and personally directed the first large gas attack at Ypres in 1915. He got the Nobel Prize in Chemistry anyway, and the protests were loud. He was Jewish; he fled Germany in 1933 and died the next year in Basel. Bread from air and poison gas came from the same desk.
Nuclear fission was identified in Berlin at the end of 1938 by the chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Straßmann, working from an experimental program Lise Meitner had spent thirty years building with Hahn. By then she was gone. As a Jewish scientist she had fled to Sweden that July, and it was Meitner, with her nephew Otto Frisch, who worked out what the results actually meant. Hahn got the Nobel Prize. She did not.
And the jet engine: Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain’s design flew in the Heinkel He 178 in August 1939, a few days before the invasion of Poland, making it the first jet aircraft anywhere. Frank Whittle in Britain had patented the same principle years earlier and got to the air later. Every flight you have taken uses that technology, and it arrived when and where it did because a country was preparing for war. More of that period is on my page about German history.
What We Do Not Actually Get to Claim
Plenty of things get filed under German inventions that are not, and this page used to make several of those mistakes itself, so let me clear them up.
The birth control pill was developed in the United States by Gregory Pincus and John Rock, on synthesis work by Carl Djerassi and Frank Colton, funded by Katharine McCormick. Schering in Berlin brought out Anovlar in 1961, which made it the first pill sold in Europe. First in Europe is not the same as invented here.
Levi Strauss was born Löb Strauß in Buttenheim in Upper Franconia, and Heinz and Hellmann’s were both founded by men with German roots. Fine, and worth knowing if you are tracing your own family. But riveted work pants were patented in San Francisco, ketchup is not ours, and mayonnaise is French. Emigrants are not exports.
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit is an awkward case, since he was born in Danzig and did his working life in the Netherlands. Claim him if you like. Just do not be surprised when the Poles and the Dutch both show up with paperwork. ;-)
Something else to notice: how often the payoff went somewhere else entirely. Nipkow could not afford his own patent fee. Drais was mocked into obscurity. Diesel walked off a ship. Röntgen gave his discovery away on purpose, and Eichengrün had his taken from him. Meanwhile, the file format from Erlangen ended up on every phone on earth.
If you are curious what Germany does with a good idea once the company lawyers get involved, I have a page on the German patent system, and the brands that grew out of all this are on Made in Germany and German engineering.