Everyone knows they invented the Haber-Bosch process. Pretty important shit.
Don’t get me started on the Haber process. My students will tell you that I can and will go on for half an hour about how it prolonged WW1 and is one of the first commercial processes to make use of Le Chateliers principle.
Also, probably best not to spend too much time idolizing Fritz Haber, as I’m pretty certain he went on to become a staunch supporter of Hitler.
Really a fascinating bit of science history
I’m pretty certain he went on to become a staunch supporter of Hitler
The exact opposite is true.
I must have been remembering that his research between the World Wars lead to the development of Zyklon B muddled that up with some other chemist (maybe Otto Ambros?). I’ll see if I can find my source.
Edit: probably Richard Kuhn who fell into line and fired Jewish coworkers at the direction of the Nazis or Herman Kolbe who was an outspoken German nationalist and anti-Semite. I use all three of them as examples of prominent scientists behaving badly in my O-Chem course.
Zyklon B was not developed for killing people. The most common usage was for killing lice in clothes. (To make it very clear: It was also used for killing people in Vernichtungslagern).
Zyklon B might not have been developed as a chemical weapon, but Haber was instrumental in developing and advocating for the use of chemical weapons explicitly on humans for Germany and Spain both during and after WWI (source)
I recall that one of the men ended up shooting themselves or their wives did or something along those lines. It was the one that did his best to kill as many people with chemical weapons as he could.
And Haber of Haber-Bosch fame also invented using poisonous gas as a weapon in WW1.
They invented Germany, that was a pretty big deal
Meh. Strongly derivative work, and they kept reinventing the wheel.
They didn’t invent East Germany.
Name something the Germans didn’t invent.
concentration camps
Nope. The Brits did that, in South Africa, iirc.
Oh, right. Somehow I only noticed the original post.
You are supposed to mention things the Germans didn’t invent in this section.
But they were the first to have a bakery attached.
Inefficiency
Germans known inefficiency pretty damn well, I can tell you that much.
Telephone
Airplanes.
Germany actually did invent this. The brothers Wright only stuck an engine to it. The first glider that actually deserved its name was inveted by Otto Lilienthal. He died in it. Without his work, the Wright brothers would not have been able to build their plane.
Technically, the Wrights’ main contribution was the 3-axis steering mechanism, which is what made powered flight practical.
I agree. Lilienthal showed a proof of concept. The Wrights made it practical. As soon as aerodynamics was understood a bit better, there was enough lift, to move the whole elevator assembli to the back of the plane, but apart from that, the whole thing still is the most practical approach.
All inventions being based on some previous work, is it not the Wright who invented the airplane, and Lilienthal who invented the glider?
Civil engineering. And they’ve been confused at how the Italians beat them to it ever since
Noodles.
Humor
Tough one
Greggs sausage rolls. Or are we counting the Anglo-Saxons as ex-pats?
The number zero, sanitation, statistics.
Hitler
And what about Mozart?
Rockets
Wasn’t that china?
China invented fireworks around 1k years ago, but Germany made the first one that went to space (the V2, the same one they used to bomb a bunch of places in WWII), and scientists from Germany helped to develop rockets a lot further after Operation Paperclip
Schadenfreude. I mean they probably didn’t invent the feeling but I can give them credit for it along with the word.
" I also like hiraeth. It’s a Welsh concept of longing for home."
Weird way to spell “Heimweh”
Any word in Welsh is a weird way to spell a word.
Or homesickness. Fernweh, on the other hand, only exists (somewhat) in English in idioms, afaik: itchy feet
wanderlust…damn it.
Why aren’t they called “homelust” or “wandersickness?”
The English “wanderlust” comes from the German Wanderlust more recently (1902). In German, Lust is related to the English “lust,” but it’s got less of a sensual connotation. “Homesickness” also comes from German (1798), but it was translated into English.
“Weh” means pain which is reflecting the feeling better.
Yeah, that’s a good call!
That is not quite the same thing.
TIL that’s a feeling and not just the TF2 laughing emote
Nowadays we invent things by describing the thing in Chatgibidy instead.
Chatskibidi?
Hard to say. There are soo many Germans, who knows what they’ve googled!
Communism
Relatedly: the pension. (Before implementing the state pension, Bismarck probably saw nightmares that involved red and black banners.)
everything that germany invented before google existed.
German ingenuity really fell off after they were done with the warmongering
Modern physics.
Nuclear physics.
The bicycle
The car
The computer (arguably, with the Zuse Z3)Spoiler: I’m German.
Not the computer, but the first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer (which would be a stage in computer hardware.)
It would be Babbage’s machine as mechanical computers precede digital ones and only if we only allow nonspecific turing complete machines.
It was the first programmable, fully automatic, digital, turing-complete computer (although they only found out the last part after Zuse died).
So I’d argue, it was the first computer in the sense we understand and use the word today.
They invented you
Volkswagen, puma, Adidas, aldi, lidl…
Those are brands, not inventions. However, Otto, Benz and Diesel were all Germans, so modern cars along with both common types of ICEs were invented by Germans.
The hamburger, from the city of Hamburg.
And German chocolate cake from Deutschschokoladenkuchen
And schadenfreude: the joy that comes from others suffering!
Fun fact: German Chocolate Cake is actually from Texas. Either the cocoa company or the baker (I can’t remember which) was named “German” and I think the original name was “German’s chocolate cake”
It’s also just a super German state from an immigration perspective. At the time, the Mexicans were very upset by all of the Europeans jumping the borders and taking work they didn’t particularly want anyway.
German-American culture was heavily downplayed, in the 20th century… for some reason.
Honestly it’d taken a huge hit before either war. New York City’s wealthy German families had an annual cruise together. One year, the boat sank.
This sounds like a Darwin Award:
The disastrous fire was fueled by the straw, oily rags, and lamp oil strewn around the room.: 98–102 The first notice of a fire was at 10 a.m.; eyewitnesses claimed the initial blaze began in various locations, including a paint locker filled with flammable liquids and a cabin filled with gasoline.
A lot of folks don’t realize that. We have cities like Fredericksburg and New Braunfels and events like Wurstfest and water parks like Schlitterbahn. We have Shiner Bock and Ziegenbock beer.
There’s a lot of German heritage running around here.
Pretty heavily found in parts of Michigan and Ohio, too.
Correct, the credit for that goes to Texas – the use of Coconut and Pecans should have given it away, those were very ingredients rare in Germany (still kinda are to this day).
The first known instance of this recipe comes from a lady from Dallas, who named it after the brand of chocolate she was using to make it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_chocolate_cake
Wasn’t the hamburger invented in the US? There they had Frikadellen, which are arguably much better.
As far as the story goes, the meat-in-a-bun concept was taken by sailors from Hamburg to the USA, where it was tweaked for local preferences and then called a hamburger. So the Germans invented it, USA marketed it.
The saxophone
Sorry, Adolphe Sax was from Belgium
Health insurance. Little known fact but it was actually invented not just before Google but before the entire internet.
