Although it has now been replaced by the
Celsius temperature scale in almost all countries except for USA and
Belize, Fahrenheit (in which water's freezing point is 32 degrees
and boiling point is 212) was the world standard until relatively
recently. It was invented by German physicist Daniel Gabriel
Fahrenheit in 1724.
Aspirin, made from willow bark was developed by Felix Hoffmann in
August 1897 for pharmaceutical giant Bayer, and although a US
company claimed a patent for the drug after World War One, 12,000 of
the 50,000 tons of Acetylsalicylic acid (Aspirin) produced each year
are still made by Bayer.
After using blotting paper from her children’s school books to
remove unwanted coffee grounds, Dresden housewife Melitta Bentz had
the idea to patent her invention in 1908. She then founded a company
selling over a thousand coffee filters by the next year.
German clock manufacturer Junghans Uhren Gmbh developed a watch that
automatically adjusts itself to an atomic clock using radio signals.
It was invented in 1990 and will remain accurate to the second for
at least a million years.
The first true working car was invented by Germans Karl Benz and
Gottlieb Daimler in 1886, 22 years before the Model T Ford went into
production in the USA.
The first true accordion was invented by a German, Christian
Friedrich Buschmann. In 1822 he attached bellows to a portable
keyboard with vibrating reeds and called it a "hand-aeoline".
In 1977 after nine years of development, German inventors Jürgen
Dethloff and Helmut Göttrup created the first card with a built in
programmable microprocessor, the ancestor of the chip and PIN cards
in our wallets today.