In 1908 Melitta Bentz developed the ready-made disposable coffee filter. She used blotting paper from her son’s school exercise books. Until then, coffee was filtered through ordinary funnels with filters of cloth or blotting paper. On 20 June 1908 the Imperial Patent Office granted her a utility model. In 1958 Artur Fischer brought his plastic wall plug, made of polyamide, onto the market. German Wikipedia calls it the most successful wall plug in the world for decades. The first industrially made expansion plug had been invented in 1910 by John Joseph Rawlings. Before that, a piece of wood was set into the wall with plaster or mortar. Fischer filed more than a thousand patents and utility models. In 2014 he received the European Inventor Award for his life’s work.
The Studs of Bern
On 4 July 1954 West Germany beat Hungary 3–2 in the World Cup final in Bern, the Wunder von Bern, the miracle of Bern. Adolf Dassler, the founder of Adidas, had equipped the team with boots with screw-in studs. At half-time the studs were changed for the wet pitch, and the story became part of the legend. Dassler had filed for a utility model in November 1952. Others had come earlier. Ludwig Wacker of Zweibrücken received a patent for studs in 1925, and a master shoemaker in Bremen received one in 1949. Hannover 96 wore screw-in studs in the German championship final in May 1954. German Wikipedia adds about the World Cup final: Die tatsächliche Wirkung kann anhand fehlender Daten nicht zweifelsfrei geklärt werden. (The actual effect cannot be determined beyond doubt for lack of data.)
No Patent for the First Computer
On 12 May 1941 Konrad Zuse presented his Z3 in his workshop in Berlin. German Wikipedia says: Die Z3 gilt heute als erster funktionstüchtiger Computer der Welt. (The Z3 is today considered the world’s first working computer.) Its article on the machine opens more carefully and calls it one of the first working digital computers in the world. The Z3 was destroyed in an air raid on 21 December 1943. In 1941 Zuse had filed a patent application that described the machine. It was published in 1952, but other companies, among them IBM, objected. The dispute went through every court until the Federal Patent Court decided in 1967 that the inventor of the computer could not receive a patent mangels Erfindungshöhe, for lack of inventive step. Zuse himself called the English mathematician Charles Babbage den eigentlichen Vater des Computers, the real father of the computer.
The Life Journey of a German Inventor
Carl Benz filed a patent for a vehicle with a gas engine on 29 January 1886. It was granted on 2 November 1886. On 3 July 1886 he made the first public test drive in Mannheim. In 2011 UNESCO added the patent to its Memory of the World register. Benz’s three-wheeler is described as the world’s first practical motor car with a combustion engine. Steam vehicles had been in use long before. In August 1888 his wife Bertha drove it from Mannheim to Pforzheim with their two teenage sons, without her husband’s knowledge. A pharmacy in Wiesloch, where she bought fuel, is considered the world’s first filling station. Her experiences on the drive fed into later cars, among them a low gear for steep hills and leather linings for the brakes. In 1925 Benz’s memoirs appeared under the title Lebensfahrt eines deutschen Erfinders, The Life Journey of a German Inventor. They were written by his son-in-law and authorized by Benz.
The Greatest Germans
In 2003 the public broadcaster ZDF asked viewers to choose the greatest German in a series called Unsere Besten, Our Best. The result was broadcast on 28 November 2003. The top ten were Konrad Adenauer, Martin Luther, Karl Marx, Sophie and Hans Scholl, Willy Brandt, Johann Sebastian Bach, Goethe, Johannes Gutenberg, Otto von Bismarck and Albert Einstein. In the list of results, Gutenberg, in eighth place, appears as the Erfinder des Mobilletterndrucks, the inventor of printing with movable type. German Wikipedia is more precise. It says Gutenberg is considered the inventor of modern printing with movable metal type and of the printing press. Around 1040 a Chinese smith, Bi Sheng, had already made movable type from ceramic, and in 1377 a Korean book was printed with metal type.
The Temple of Technology
The Deutsches Museum in Munich was founded in 1903 by the engineer Oskar von Miller. Its full name is Deutsches Museum von Meisterwerken der Naturwissenschaft und Technik, the German Museum of Masterpieces of Science and Technology. Its main building opened on 7 May 1925. At its center is the Ehrensaal, the Hall of Honor, which the museum calls Tempel der Technik und Naturwissenschaft, the temple of technology and science. It was meant to Ehrfurcht wecken vor den herausragenden Schöpfern der „Meisterwerke“, to awaken awe before the outstanding creators of the masterpieces. It followed the 19th-century idea that Männer machen Geschichte, men make history. The nuclear physicist Lise Meitner is the only woman honored there so far. The museum now writes that it views such a strongly person-centered portrayal of technology and history critically.
The Midtech Trap
In April 2024 economists writing for the ifo Institute, among them its president Clemens Fuest, wrote that Europe and Germany are caught in a Midtech-Falle, a mid-tech trap. Much of the money for research goes into existing industries. Innovationen in Europa und Deutschland sind durch die Ingenieurskunst auf etablierten Feldern getrieben, they wrote, innovations in Europe and Germany are driven by engineering in established fields, such as the car industry. The authors called the concentration of German companies’ research spending on the car industry a great risk for the German economy. In September 2025 Germany fell from ninth to eleventh place in the Global Innovation Index. The president of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office called it Anlass zur Sorge, a cause for concern.
Leadership Again
On 11 February 2026 the Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation handed its annual report to Chancellor Friedrich Merz. He said: Wir haben eine hoch innovative Forschungslandschaft in Deutschland. (We have a highly innovative research landscape in Germany.) Damit verbindet sich für uns der Anspruch, wieder Technologieführerschaft zu übernehmen. (With this comes our ambition to take on technology leadership again.) He added: Forschung ist kein Selbstzweck. (Research is not an end in itself.)
The Vocabulary of the Inventor
der Tüftler
Someone who likes to puzzle over a tricky technical problem until it is solved.
der Erfindergeist
The inventive spirit.
deutsche Ingenieurskunst
German engineering art. A fixed phrase of praise.
Daniel Düsentrieb
The German name of the Disney inventor known in English as Gyro Gearloose. In German-speaking countries the name stands for the brilliant, slightly scatterbrained inventor. His motto in the German comics, Dem Ingeniör ist nichts zu schwör, nothing is too hard for the engineer, comes from Heinrich Seidel’s “Ingenieurlied” of 1871.
das Land der Tüftler und Erfinder
The land of tinkerers and inventors. In 1999 this phrase summed up the image of the state of Baden-Württemberg.
The President’s Prize
Since 1997 the Federal President has awarded the Deutscher Zukunftspreis, the German Future Prize for technology and innovation. It carries 250,000 euros, and the public broadcaster ZDF shows the ceremony in its evening program. Under its statutes, the honored work must be one that will with high probability be marketable and so create jobs. On 17 November 2021 the prize went to Uğur Şahin, Özlem Türeci, Christoph Huber and Katalin Karikó of BioNTech, who had developed a vaccine against COVID-19 at unprecedented speed. On 27 November 2024 Frank-Walter Steinmeier gave the 28th prize to a team from ams-OSRAM and a Fraunhofer institute for a new car headlight. It uses more than 25,000 tiny LEDs in a matrix, so that the light can be adapted to each situation.