Guido Storz invented a coupling for fire hoses in 1882. It has no male end and no female end. Any two couplings of the same size fit together, and a short turn locks them. A firefighter never has to look for the right end of a hose.
Some German fire brigades adopted it as early as 1887. It was patented in 1890. Sources disagree on whether that patent was Swiss or German. The Storz-Kupplung is still the standard of German fire brigades.
In 1952 Hannes Marker, a ski instructor from Garmisch, founded his binding company. His Duplex toe held the boot with clips on springs. In a fall, the clips were forced outward, and the boot was released.
Marker calls the Duplex the world’s first binding with a releasing toe. The French firm Look had introduced its Nevada release binding in 1950. The year of the Duplex is also uncertain. Marker gives 1952, other sources give 1953.
The Lamy safari has been made since 1980. Its grip section is not round. It is shaped for the three-finger grip used in writing. Bernt Spiegel of the Entwicklungsgruppe Mannheim, one of its designers, also designed the Lamy abc for children who are learning to write. Lamy says its grip promotes a healthy pen posture.
STABILO sells its EASYoriginal pens with grip zones and shapes matched to the child’s age, developed together with scientists. There are versions for left-handers and for right-handers.
The Thermomix from Vorwerk weighs the ingredients itself, from 5 grams to 3 kilograms in steps of 5 grams. The TM5 of 2014 was the first Thermomix with a touchscreen. Its guided cooking function leads the cook Schritt für Schritt, step by step, through the recipe, mit Gelinggarantie, with a guarantee of success.
Vorwerk now offers more than 100,000 such recipes in more than 20 languages. In 2024 its Thermomix business had sales of 1.7 billion euros.
In 1978 Mercedes-Benz offered ABS in the S-Class, developed with Bosch. In full braking, a computer watches each wheel and reduces the brake pressure automatically, so the car can still be steered. The driver airbag with belt tensioner followed in the S-Class. Its public world premiere was in February 1981.
In late 2002 PRE-SAFE came to the S-Class of the 2003 model series. It recognizes dangerous situations in advance and prepares the occupants before a possible crash. In 2009 ATTENTION ASSIST followed in the E-Class and S-Class. It judges the driver’s tiredness mainly from steering movements, with more than 70 parameters. When the driver needs a break, a coffee cup appears on the instrument panel.
In March 2009 an EU regulation began to take the ordinary incandescent light bulb off the market. Soon such bulbs were imported into Germany as Heatballs, small heaters. The argument was that a bulb gives off 95 percent of its energy as heat.
In July 2011 the administrative court in Aachen was not convinced. Consumers would see Heatballs as bulbs for lighting, the court said, not as small heaters.
Not every German welcomed a more efficient product when the law required it.
Porsche sold 50,000 cars in 1986 and only 14,000 in 1993. That year it lost 239 million marks. Wendelin Wiedeking brought in Japanese consultants led by Chihiro Nakao. To Nakao the plant looked more like a warehouse than a factory. He handed Wiedeking a circular saw and told him to cut the storage shelves along the line in half.
Porsche took lean management and lean production from Japan. Wiedeking said: Nicht hohe Investitionen, sondern veränderte Prozesse sind der Schlüssel zum Erfolg. Not high investment but changed processes are the key to success. According to the magazine IndustryWeek, the hours needed to build a 911 later fell from 120 to 60.
Porsche’s efficient manufacturing was partly learned in Japan.
Vergeude keine Energie, verwerte sie! Do not waste energy, use it! The sentence is known as the energetic imperative of the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald. It was meant as a general basic law of technology.
In May 2022 the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Freiburg announced die effizienteste Solarzelle der Welt, the most efficient solar cell in the world. Its Wirkungsgrad, its efficiency, was 47.6 percent. The institute had raised the value from 46.1 percent. The four-junction cell was measured under sunlight concentrated 665 times.
Volkswagen calls it the Modularer Querbaukasten, the modular transverse toolkit, or MQB. Many models share the same parts and the same basic structure. The first Golf built on it left the line in Wolfsburg in October 2012. Within ten years more than 32 million vehicles had been built on the platform.
According to Volkswagen, the number of engine and transmission variants fell by almost half. The air-conditioning units went from 102 versions to 28. For the Golf of 2019, about 80 percent of the existing body-shop equipment was used again.