Curated playlist
German inventions
- CocaineCocaine is a substance that has shaped empires, fueled cartels, redrawn borders, and rewired human brains, all while originating from the leaves of two plants growing on Andean hillsides. Indigenous South Americans have been chewing those…
- PolyethylenePolyethylene is the most commonly produced plastic on Earth, and it is almost certainly touching something near you right now. The bag on your counter, the bottle in your hand, the film wrapped around a pallet in a warehouse somewhere.…
- AccordionThe accordion takes its name from a 19th-century German word, Akkordeon, rooted in Akkord, meaning a musical chord or a concord of sounds. Inside its pleated bellows, air rushes past strips of brass or steel called reeds, and those reeds…
- AmphetamineAmphetamine is a central nervous system stimulant with a history stretching back to 1887, when Romanian chemist Lazăr Edeleanu first synthesized it in Germany and named it phenylisopropylamine. For nearly four decades, the molecule sat…
- Diesel engineThe diesel engine carries the name of Rudolf Diesel, a German engineer who spent years trying to build a machine that could extract far more work from heat than any engine before it. The engine he eventually produced does not ignite its…
- Electron microscopeThe electron microscope can reveal a world that sits more than a hundred thousand times beyond the reach of ordinary light. Visible light has a wavelength that limits optical microscopes to resolving details no finer than about 200…
- BicycleBy the early 21st century, more than 1 billion bicycles existed in the world. The bicycle was invented in Europe in the 19th century, and its basic shape has barely changed since the first chain-driven model appeared around 1885. Yet…
- CarThere are over 1.6 billion cars in use worldwide as of 2025, and the count is still climbing fast. A car is a motor vehicle with wheels that runs primarily on roads, seats one to eight people, and carries passengers rather than cargo. Most…
- TelevisionIn 2013-79% of the world's households owned a television set. This was a medium that began as a spinning disk with holes punched into it, a contraption that could barely render a human face. To get any image at all, an early inventor…
- Integrated circuitA modern integrated circuit can pack many billions of transistors into an area the size of a human fingernail. That single fact captures a transformation that began in the 1960s, when the first chips held only a handful of transistors. The…