Curated playlist
German inventions
- CocaineSpanish colonizers banned coca, then legalized and taxed it. Miners and field workers relied on the leaf.
- PolyethyleneDuring World War II, Britain sent all its polyethylene to insulate radar cables.
- AccordionThe accordion got its name from a patent for one-key chords. Cyrill Demian sought protection for it in Vienna in 1829.
- AmphetamineIn late 1933, a drug company began selling amphetamine as a nasal inhaler. Smith, Kline and French called it Benzedrine.
- Diesel engineA diesel engine has no spark plug to light its fuel. Squeezed air gets hot enough to ignite it.
- Electron microscopeAn electron can have a wavelength more than 100,000 times smaller than visible light's.
- BicycleWilbur and Orville Wright ran a bicycle company during the 1890s bike boom.
- AspirinEvery year, people swallow an estimated 40000 tonne of aspirin, somewhere between 50 and 120 billion pills. In the United States alone, doctors wrote more than 14 million prescriptions for it in 2023, which made it the 46th most commonly…
- CarIn August 1888, Bertha Benz made the first road trip in an internal combustion car.
- TelevisionEarly television could not show a real face, so an inventor filmed a ventriloquist's dummy.
- Integrated circuitJack Kilby's first integrated circuit was not the design modern chips descend from.
- Nuclear fissionNuclear fission, the splitting of an atom's nucleus into two or more smaller nuclei, passed its most important test on the 2nd of December 1942. Enrico Fermi had already pulled every control rod but one out of a towering stack called…
- TramadolTramadol is a painkiller that, in 2013, was reported to be sitting inside the roots of an African tree. The researcher Michel de Waard announced in the journal Angewandte Chemie that the roots of the African pin cushion tree, Nauclea…
- Haber processThe Haber process makes ammonia out of ordinary air. In the summer of 1909, the German chemist Fritz Haber and his assistant Robert Le Rossignol showed it working, and the result arrived drop by drop. Their apparatus produced about 125 mL…
- Hot dogIn 1892, a newspaper described a "hot dog" being quickly inserted in a gash in a roll. That line is one of the earliest printed glimpses of the hot dog, a sausage served in a partly sliced bun. Americans now eat 20 billion of them every…