Top 10 Groundbreaking Inventions You Can Thank Germany For

Think of Germany, and you might picture precision engineering, reliable cars, and castles along the Rhine. But this European nation’s contribution to our daily lives runs far deeper. From the device you’re reading this on to the medicine in your cabinet, German ingenuity has fundamentally shaped the modern world. Get ready to discover the surprising stories behind ten of Germany’s most pivotal inventions.

1. The Printing Press: Spreading Knowledge to the Masses

However,the history of printing begins long before Gutenberg's time. German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436. Gutenberg employed a screw-type wine press to squeeze down evenly on the inked metal type. With the newfound ability to inexpensively mass-produce books on every imaginable topic, revolutionary ideas and priceless ancient knowledge were placed in the hands of every literate European, whose numbers doubled every century. This invention enabled the mass production of books and the rapid dissemination of knowledge throughout Europe.

2. The Automobile: The First Petrol-Powered Car

The first petrol-powered propulsive vehicle was invented by German inventor Siegfried Marcus in 1864.But his early designs were not very practical. The first successful automobile to go into full production was the Motorwagen, designed in Mannheim in 1885 by Karl Benz. Benz had previously worked on the development of a four-stroke internal combustion engine in the late 1870s. Karl Benz patented the three-wheeled "Motorwagen," in 1886. Benz also patented his own throttle system, spark plugs, gear shifters, a water radiator, a carburetor and other fundamentals to the automobile. At a same time, Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler was also working independently on a four-stroke internal combustion engine. Gottlieb would similarly build a car and set up his own motor company: Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft in 1887. Since then the Germans became the masters of cars. They eventually built a car company that still exists today as the Daimler Group.

3. X-Rays: Making the Invisible Visible

Seeing broken bones that need to heal,was impossible until Wilhelm Konrad von Röntgen invented the x-rays or Roentgen rays in 1895. It was a significant scientific advancement that would ultimately benefit a variety of fields, by making the invisible visible. Today, X-ray technology is widely used in medicine, material analysis and devices such as airport security scanners. Röntgen's discovery occurred accidentally in his Wurzburg, Germany, lab, where he was testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass. On November 8, 1895, Roentgen noticed that when he shielded the tube with heavy black cardboard, the green fluorescent light caused a platinobarium screen nine feet at away to glow too far away to be reacting to the cathode rays as he understood them. He determined the fluorescence was caused by invisible rays originating from the Crookes tube, which penetrated the opaque black paper wrapped around the tube. He dubbed the rays that caused this glow X-rays because of their unknown nature. Further experiments revealed that this new type of ray was capable of passing through most substances, including the soft tissues of the body, but not higher-density substances such as bone or lead and that they can be photographed. One of his earliest photographic plates from his experiments was a film of his wife Bertha's hand, with her wedding ring clearly visible. Wilhelm Röntgen received numerous accolades for his work, including the first Nobel Prize in physics in 1901, and never tried to patent his discovery.

4. Aspirin: The World's Favorite Remedy

In 1897,the pharmaceutical company Bayer developed a medication that would be a huge, worldwide success. They called it Aspirin. It is one of the most popular remedies against colds, inflammation, high temperature or pain. And it used to be made in Germany exclusively. The German chemist Felix Hoffmann famously synthesized two drugs: aspirin, one of the most widely beneficial drugs ever, and heroin, one of the most harmful of illegal substances. In the 1890s, his father suffered from rheumatism and also from the side effects of the treatment at that time to relieve his pain: salicylic acid salts, which had an extremely bitter taste and, in the high doses prescribed to patients (6 to 8 grams), caused severe irritation to the stomach. The cure was a daily ordeal for Herr Hoffmann and he asked his son Felix —who in 1897 was a young researcher at the pharmaceutical company Friedrich Bayer & Co.— for an alternative. The discovery of aspirin is customarily said to have resulted from Felix Hoffmann's rheumatic father encouraging his son to produce a medicine devoid of the unpleasant effects of sodium salicylate. Hoffmann, a chemist in the pharmaceutical laboratory of the German dye manufacturer Friedrich Bayer & Co in Elberfeld, consulted the chemical literature and came across the synthesis of acetylsalicylic acid and then prepared the first sample of pure acetylsalicylic acid on 10 August 1897. This was marketed in 1899 under the registered trademark of Aspirin.

5. The Computer: The First Programmable Machine

The inventor of the electro-mechanical,binary calculator Z1, Konrad Zuse, was a construction engineer from Berlin. From 1936 to 1938 Konrad Zuse developed and built Z1, world’s first binary digital computer. Despite certain mechanical engineering problems it had all the basic ingredients of modern machines, using the binary system and today's standard separation of storage and control. In 1941, Zuse completes Z3, world's first fully functional programmable computer. Equipped with three logical circuits and 2,600 relays, the first fully functional, programmable computer was used in 1941. It was destroyed in 1944 during the war. Because of its historical importance, a copy was made in 1960 and put on display in the German Museum in Munich. In 1945, Zuse describes Plankalkuel, world's first higher-level programming language, containing many standard features of today's programming languages. Zuse also used Plankalkuel to design world's first chess program. In 1946, Zuse founds world's first computer startup company: the Zuse-Ingenieurbüro Hopferau.

6. Nuclear Fission: Splitting the Atom

In 1938,Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann became the first to recognize that the uranium atom, when bombarded by neutrons, split. Following Fermi’s work, Meitner and Hahn, along with chemist Fritz Strassmann, also began bombarding uranium and other elements with neutrons and identifying the series of decay products. Hahn carried out the careful chemical analysis; Meitner, the physicist, explained the nuclear processes involved. In December 1938, Hahn and Strassmann, continuing their experiments bombarding uranium with neutrons, found what appeared to be isotopes of barium among the decay products. They couldn’t explain it, since it was thought that a tiny neutron couldn't possibly cause the nucleus to crack in two to produce much lighter elements. Hahn sent a letter to Meitner describing the puzzling finding. In December 1938, over Christmas vacation, physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch made a startling discovery that would immediately revolutionize nuclear physics. Trying to explain a puzzling finding made by nuclear chemist Otto Hahn in Berlin, Meitner and Frisch realized that something previously thought impossible was actually happening: that a uranium nucleus had split in two. News of the splitting of the atom and the release of tremendous amounts of energy reached the United States and ultimately resulted in the development of the first nuclear bomb. After World War II Hahn became a passionate campaigner against the use of nuclear bombs.

7. Television: An Eye-Catcher for the Living Room

In 1931,world's first all-electronic television system was developed by Baron Manfred von Ardenne in Germany. Von Ardenne had performed the first public demonstration of his electronic television system at the Berlin Radio Exhibition. In 1935, the first regular television program was broadcast in Germany. German inventor Paul Gottlieb Nipkow developed a rotating disc technology in 1884 called the Nipkow disk to transmit pictures over wires. Which laid the foundation of television since his disk was a fundamental component in the first televisions. Nipkow is credited with discovering television's scanning principle, in which the light intensities of small portions of an image are successively analyzed and transmitted. German scientist Karl Ferdinand Braun invented the cathode ray tube (CRT) in 1897. This "picture tube," which for years was the only device that could create the images viewers saw, was the basis for the advent of electronic television.

8. The Fridge: Modern Refrigeration

Carl von Linde was the first person to develope modern refrigeration.His invention of a continuous process of liquefying gases in large quantities formed a basis for the modern technology of refrigeration. In 1871 Carl von Linde published an essay on improved refrigeration techniques and 2 years later in Munich he built the first practical and portable compressor refrigeration machine. His research there on heat theory, from 1873 to 1877, led to his invention of the first reliable and efficient compressed-ammonia refrigerator. In 1876, he come up with the first functional refrigerator. Linde’s efficient new refrigeration technology was first offered to businesses. He established the company to promote this invention was an international success: refrigeration rapidly displaced ice in food handling and was introduced into many industrial processes. His technology was then sold all over Europe. Refrigeration provided big benefits to breweries, slaughterhouses and cold storage facilities. Carl von Linde was also the first person to extract oxygen gas from the air, making it a commercially viable product and thus launching the industrial gas industry.

9. The MP3 Format: Music in Your Pocket

MP3 stands for MPEG Audio Layer III.MP3 is part of MPEG, an acronym for Motion Pictures Expert Group, a family of standards for displaying video and audio using lossy compression. Thanks to mp3, we can take entire music collections with us, in tiny players. It is a standard for audio compression that makes any music file smaller with little or no loss of sound quality. MPEG Layer III or MP3 involves only audio compression. In 1987, with a project named EUREKA project EU147, the West German Fraunhofer Institute began researching high-quality, low bit-rate audio coding. In 1987, the West German Fraunhofer Institute managed to compress music files to a format that does not need that much space, by getting rid of all frequencies humans cannot hear anyway. It now owns the licensing and the patent rights to the audio compression technology. The inventors named on the MP3 patent are Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein. The project was sponsored by a small scale German government project. It is a common audio format for consumer audio storage, as well as a de facto standard of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music on digital audio players.

10. The Scanner: Fragmented Pictures

Although little known outside Germany,Rudolf Hell helped to shape the world as we know it. He invented a direction-finder for pilots and the “Hellschreiber”, a precursor of the fax machine. In 1951, he developed the prototype for digital image processing: the Klischograph made it possible to scan images electronically. In 1963 he invented the first scanner for color images.