Five inventions from Germany  Milestones

Germany, the land of poets and thinkers – and inventors. Many groundbreaking ideas that still shape our everyday lives today come from Germany. Here are five pioneering inventions made in Germany.

The parcel parachute – Käthe Paulus

Initially only used for military purposes, parachuting is now a must on almost every bucket list of things to do in life. But whether you're a paratrooper or an adrenaline junkie  everyone must be grateful to Käthe Paulus, born in 1868. Originally from near Offenbach, she wanted to fly high from an early age. At the age of 25, she became the first woman in Germany to complete a parachute jump. Just one year later, she witnessed her husband's death in a balloon accident with her own eyes. She then wanted to make skydiving safer and developed a technique that was both space-saving and protected against entanglement. In 1915, she presented her parcel parachute. A year later, she was authorised to produce 7,000 of them for the military.

Cologne sausage – Konrad Adnauer

You read that right, it says Konrad Adenauer! And yes, THE Konrad Adenauer is meant, the first German Chancellor after the Second World War. As we all know, necessity is the mother of invention – that's what the Lord Mayor of Cologne must have thought in 1916 when he introduced the Cologne sausage. World War I, meat was in short supply and Adenauer was looking for an alternative source of protein for his population. This is how the Cologne sausage was created, with soya as its main ingredient. To put it simply: Konrad Adenauer was already a vegan influencer over 100 years ago. Nuclear fission – Otto Hahn
In 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Straßmann made one of the most important and at the same time most devastating discoveries in human history: nuclear fission. In addition to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Hahn, a staunch opponent of the Nazis, was also recognised for his commitment to humanity. For example, he saved Jews from deportation. What his discovery - the production of atomic bombs made possible by nuclear fission - caused in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shook him to the core. Throughout his life, he remained an opponent of nuclear armament and called for peace.

Coffee filter – Melitta Benz

Coffee – the pick-me-up in the morning, the digestive for lunch, the drink of choice both when granny comes round and on a date. Perhaps we would still be consuming the all-rounder among beverages with coffee grounds today if it weren't for Melitta Benz. In 1908, the inventor made the first coffee filter from her son's blotting paper and tin cans. Fun fact: Her company was entered in the commercial register with the impressive sum of 73 pfennigs in equity.

MP3 – Karlheinz Brandenburg

No school playground in the 1990s and 2000s was complete without an MP3 player. But anyone who thinks that the invention of the audio format came from the garage of a Silicon Valley tycoon is quite wrong.  It was Karlheinz Brandenburg, a scientist from Erlangen, who introduced the MP3 format together with his colleagues in 1991. The reduction in size of audio files without any noticeable loss of quality quickly displaced other common technologies – and who knows whether there would ever have been an iPod without this invention.

October 2024