Oskar Barnack was a precision mechanic and designer at the optical firm Leitz in Wetzlar. His idea was to use 35-millimeter cinema film in a still camera. In 1913 and 1914 he completed the first Leica camera and two prototypes.
According to the Leica magazine LFI, it seems plausible that his asthma and his passion for nature photography led him to the idea. The magazine adds that none of the stories about the camera’s origin can be confirmed with certainty.
In an interview with the magazine Musikexpress in December 1976, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk talked about their instruments. Alle Instrumente, die wir mit unseren Ingenieuren entwickelt haben, sind patentiert. All the instruments we have developed with our engineers are patented. They wanted to produce them in series and sell them. They had also built an electronic flute themselves, which they called their magic flute.
The Red Dot Award judges product design by criteria such as degree of innovation, functionality, formal quality, ergonomics, durability and ecological compatibility. The jury tests each product live, on site. According to the organizers, the jurors care not only about appearance but also about function, ergonomics and durability.
Another German prize, the iF design award, has been given since 1954 by an organization founded in Hanover in 1953.
Stiftung Warentest leaves the price out of its quality grade. Teaching material developed with the foundation gives the reason. Da der Preis nichts über die Produktqualität aussagt, because the price says nothing about the quality of the product, it is not part of the rating. The price is still shown, as important information for the purchase.
As the foundation put it in 2003: Teurer ist nicht gleich besser. More expensive is not the same as better.
For 24 years, until 2005, Peter Lustig played a curious tinkerer in blue dungarees in the children’s program Löwenzahn, dandelion. He lived in a converted blue construction trailer. He tried to understand the world by tinkering, trying things out and thinking aloud. Many of the gadgets in the program he really invented himself or brought from home. Before television he had worked as a sound engineer.
In 1965 the inventor of the Fischer wall plug, Artur Fischer, gave construction kits as a Christmas present to large customers. A year later fischertechnik was at the toy fair. Fischer also supplied school classes, to give children Lust auf Technik und Tüfteln, a desire for technology and tinkering. He himself filed more than a thousand patents and utility models.
The Kosmos kits go back further. Kosmos made kits for electricity in 1921, optics in 1923 and chemistry around 1927.
From 15 August to 30 September 1923 the Bauhaus held an exhibition in Weimar, at the height of the inflation. Walter Gropius opened it with a lecture called Kunst und Technik – eine neue Einheit, art and technology, a new unity. The largest exhibit was the model house Am Horn.
From 1922 the Bauhaus potters had developed prototypes that factories could produce. The exhibition lost money, but it drew wide attention in Germany and abroad.
In the autumn of 1899 Kaiser Wilhelm II ended a long dispute. He gave the Prussian technical universities the right to award a doctorate, the Doktor-Ingenieur, or Dr.-Ing. With this right the technical universities reached the standing of the universities. Hesse followed for Darmstadt on 25 November 1899.
The first doctoral examinations at Darmstadt took place on 8 March 1902. Two engineers, Julius Adolf Möllinger from Nuremberg and Ernst Vetterlein from Leipzig, became doctors of engineering.
Series production of the Mercedes-Benz G-Class began early in 1979 in Graz, Austria. Mercedes had developed it together with Steyr-Daimler-Puch. The German army and the United Nations use it under the name Wolf. In the summer of 2017 the 300,000th left the line. For its 40th anniversary the magazine firmenauto chose the headline Gebaut für die Ewigkeit, built for eternity.
The VOX cooking show Das perfekte Dinner began on 6 March 2006. Each candidate hosts the others for one evening, and at the end the guests give the evening 0 to 10 points. By March 2026 there had been 4,796 hosting evenings. Full points were given 32 times.
On average, the winner of a week has 35 points. The guests who give the points are themselves competing for that win.