German Inventions

Although it has now been replaced by the Celsius temperature scale in almost all countries except for USA and Belize, Fahrenheit (in which water's freezing point is 32 degrees and boiling point is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.

Daimler and Benz History

Long before there was Daimler Benz and Mercedes, there were two car companies. At the same time that Karl Benz was developing his three-wheeler in Mannheim, Germany, in the 1880s, Gottlieb Daimler was creating the world's first four-wheeled automobile with an internal combustion engine in Stuttgart, 75 miles away.

Incidentally, Benz' wife, Bertha used her dowry to pay off his debts and keep him in business. She also undertook the world’s first long-distance car journey, and is acknowledged as the first lady motorist in history.

Daimler received his patent for a "vehicle with gas or petroleum drive machine" in 1885. Benz built three gas engine models between 1885 and 1887, and received the patent for his design in 1886.

In the United States at the time, cars powered by steam, gasoline, and electricity were all proliferating on the roadways.

In April 1900, Emil Jellinek, an Austrian businessman made an agreement with DMG (Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft, or Daimler Motor Company) to buy and resell its cars. He decided to use his young daughter's name, Mercedes, as a product name. Jellinek ordered 36 vehicles at a total price of 550,000 marks, equivalent to over 2 million dollars today. A few weeks later, he placed a new order for another 36 vehicles.

This first ‘Mercedes’ was developed by Wilhelm Maybach, the chief engineer at DMG, and it is regarded today as the first modern automobile.

After various iterations, in November 1921, DMG applied for patents for a three-dimensional three-pointed star enclosed in a circle and it became a registered trademark in August 1923. Daimler and Benz merged in 1926.  Now you know how all the names and pieces fit together.