Germany's forgotten firsts: ten technologies you use without knowing where they began
Jet engines, chip cards, airbags, tape and the electron microscope all have German origins that rarely travel. Ten cases, checked against museums and patent records, with rival claims set out honestly.
Ask a room of executives who invented the jet engine and most will name Frank Whittle. Ask a French banker about the chip card and the answer will be Roland Moreno. Ask an American about the first computer and the answer is ENIAC. Each answer is partly right. Each also leaves out a German engineer who got there first, or at the same moment, and whose name rarely leaves the specialist museum. What follows are ten such cases. Every date has been checked against at least two independent sources, and where the claim to be first is genuinely contested, we say who else holds it.
1. The jet engine: a physicist, a car mechanic and Ernst Heinkel
On 27 August 1939, five days before the invasion of Poland, the Heinkel He 178 took off from the company airfield at Rostock-Marienehe with test pilot Erich Warsitz at the controls. It was the first aircraft to fly on jet power alone. Its engine, the HeS 3, was the work of Hans von Ohain, a young Göttingen physicist who had filed his turbojet patent in 1935.
What most people don't know: von Ohain's first demonstration engine was built not in a laboratory but by Max Hahn, a mechanic at the Göttingen garage that serviced von Ohain's sports car. Heinkel hired both men in 1936. Britain's claim is real: Frank Whittle patented a turbojet in 1930 and ran an engine on the test bed before von Ohain flew, but the Gloster E.28/39 did not fly until 15 May 1941. The two men later became friends, and in 1991 they shared the Charles Stark Draper Prize for their independent development of the turbojet. One honest footnote: before finishing his design, von Ohain read a Whittle patent through his lawyer and narrowed his own application to avoid infringing it. See our profile of the Heinkel He 178.
2. The electron microscope: a Nobel Prize 55 years late
In 1931 Ernst Ruska, working in Max Knoll's group in Berlin, built the first electron microscope. By 1933 his instrument resolved detail finer than any light microscope could. With Bodo von Borries he then developed an instrument at Siemens and Halske that went on sale in 1939 as the first series-produced electron microscope.
What most people don't know: Stockholm took more than half a century to notice. Ruska received the Nobel Prize in Physics only in 1986, and even then just half of it; the other half went to Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer for the scanning tunnelling microscope. More on the Siemens electron microscope and on Siemens.
3. Magnetic tape: the Berlin machine that Hollywood copied
AEG showed its Magnetophon tape recorder at the Berlin radio exhibition in August 1935, running on tape made by BASF in Ludwigshafen. The American tape industry, from Ampex machines to the tape on which Bing Crosby pre-recorded his radio shows, grew directly from two Magnetophons that a US Signal Corps officer shipped home in 1945.
What most people don't know: the decisive improvement, high-frequency bias, was stumbled upon in 1940 by Walter Weber at the laboratory of the German state broadcaster, after an amplifier began to oscillate. The idea was not wholly new: Americans Wendell Carlson and Glenn Carpenter had filed an AC bias patent in 1921, and Japanese researchers published on it in 1938. Weber's version was the one that reached the world. We tell the full story in a separate feature, and profile the AEG Magnetophon and BASF.
4. The programmable computer: Konrad Zuse's Z3
On 12 May 1941 Konrad Zuse presented the Z3 in Berlin to scientists from the German aviation research institute. Built from telephone relays, it was a working, program-controlled, fully automatic binary computer.
What most people don't know: the original was destroyed in an Allied air raid on Berlin in 1943. The machine visitors see in the Deutsches Museum in Munich is a working replica that Zuse's own company built in the 1960s. The title of first computer is contested, and fairly so. Britain's Colossus (1943) and the American Atanasoff Berry Computer (1942) were electronic where the Z3 was electromechanical, and the Z3 lacked conditional branching; the computer scientist Raúl Rojas showed in 1998 that it is Turing complete only in principle. See the Zuse Z3.
5. The chip card: a rocket engineer's second career
The plastic card with an embedded chip is usually credited to Roland Moreno, whose company Innovatron filed its patent in March 1974. Yet Jürgen Dethloff of Hamburg and Helmut Gröttrup had filed on an identification card carrying an integrated circuit several years earlier. The German Patent and Trade Mark Office dates their joint German application to 1969, with Austrian filings from September 1968 and Gröttrup's first identification switch applications from February 1967.
What most people don't know: Gröttrup had been a guidance and control specialist on the V-2 rocket at Peenemünde. After 1945 he led the German specialists working for the Soviet missile programme and was held in the USSR until late 1953. Moreno's PIN-protected design deserves its credit for making the card practical, but the German filings came first. The Munich security printer Giesecke+Devrient went on to deliver the world's first commercial SIM card in 1991. See Giesecke+Devrient and the SIM card.
6. The airbag: filed first, granted second
On 6 October 1951 the Munich engineer Walter Linderer filed German patent 896 312 for an inflatable device to protect car occupants in a collision. It was granted in November 1953.
What most people don't know: the American John Hetrick filed his own airbag patent in August 1952, after Linderer, yet received his US grant first, on 18 August 1953. Neither idea worked well with the compressed air of the day. General Motors offered airbags on some models in 1973 and 1974, but the system that set the template was the one Mercedes-Benz offered on the S-Class in 1981, which tensioned the seat belts first and fired the airbag second. Read more on Mercedes-Benz.
7. The cathode ray tube, and a diode nobody used
In February 1897 Ferdinand Braun, professor of physics in Strasbourg, then part of the German Empire, published a tube that steered an electron beam onto a fluorescent screen. Germans still call it the Braun tube, and it became the heart of oscilloscopes, radar screens and, for half a century, every television. Braun shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Guglielmo Marconi for his work on wireless telegraphy.
What most people don't know: in 1874, aged 24, Braun found that a metal wire touching a sulphide crystal conducts current in one direction only. It was the first semiconductor rectifier effect, the principle behind the crystal radio detector, but Braun never built a device on it. His end was bleak: he travelled to New York in 1914 to testify in a patent case involving Telefunken's Sayville station, could not return once war intervened, and died in Brooklyn in April 1918. See the Braun tube.
8. The gyrocompass, with an Einstein royalty
Hermann Anschütz-Kaempfe, an art historian turned polar enthusiast, filed his first gyroscope patent in 1904 and founded Anschütz and Co. in Kiel in 1905. His gyrocompass, which points to true north without relying on magnetism, was tested on the battleship SMS Deutschland in 1908.
What most people don't know: when Anschütz sued Elmer Sperry for patent infringement, the expert appointed in 1915 was Albert Einstein, then a Berlin professor. The court found for Anschütz. Einstein went on to help design an improved compass with the company and received one per cent of the sale price of each instrument; sources differ on whether the licence dates from 1922 or 1926. The Kiel firm still makes navigation systems as Anschütz. See the Anschütz gyrocompass.
9. The vacuum flask: from laboratory glass to picnic basket
The Scottish physicist James Dewar created the double-walled vacuum vessel in 1892 to keep liquefied gases cold. The step from laboratory to kitchen was taken in Berlin, where the glassblower Reinhold Burger, working with Albert Aschenbrenner, built a robust flask for everyday use and patented it in 1903 to 1904; museum records give the earlier year, other accounts the later one.
What most people don't know: the brand that became a generic word was German first. According to the company's own history, the name Thermos, from the Greek for heat, was chosen in a naming contest, and the American Thermos Bottle Company followed only in 1907.
10. Liquid crystals: an Austrian puzzle, a German explanation, a Darmstadt business
In 1888 the Austrian botanist Friedrich Reinitzer, working in Prague with a compound derived from carrots, saw a substance with two melting points. He sent samples to Otto Lehmann, who as professor at Karlsruhe in 1889 identified a new state of matter and called it flowing crystals. An IEEE Milestone plaque in Karlsruhe has marked the work since 2017.
What most people don't know: Lehmann worked closely with E. Merck of Darmstadt, and according to Merck the company was selling liquid crystals for research as early as 1904, more than sixty years before George Heilmeier at RCA demonstrated the first liquid crystal display in 1968. The credit is shared: it was the British chemist George Gray's cyanobiphenyls that made stable displays possible, after which Merck became the leading supplier. See Merck KGaA.
Why the credit went elsewhere
The pattern is consistent. German engineers often filed first, but war cut them off from markets, Allied technical missions carried hardware and documents abroad, and companies in Britain, France, Japan and the United States did the commercial scaling. Patents record who had the idea. Markets remember who sold it. Both deserve a place in the story.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Hans von Ohain
- AEROREPORT (MTU Aero Engines): Eighty years of jet-powered flight
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: Sir Frank Whittle
- Nobel Prize: The Nobel Prize in Physics 1986
- DPMA Inventors' Gallery: Ernst Ruska
- Zuse Internet Archive (ZIB): Z3
- DPMA: Die Chipkarte (poster gallery)
- heise online: 43 patents and a signet ring, the development of the smart card
- Wikipedia: Helmut Gröttrup
- ZF Lifetec: The story of the airbag
- Wikipedia: Airbag
- IEEE Milestones: Ferdinand Braun, a pioneer in wireless technology and electronics
- Computer History Museum: 1874, semiconductor point-contact rectifier effect is discovered
- heise online: The Schuler period and the Anschütz gyrocompass
- ETHW: IEEE Milestone, First exploration and proof of liquid crystals, 1889