Everyday heroes: legendary German innovators

The new compound could easily have been forgotten about, however, because the company's pharmacology department thought the risks were too great to carry out a clinical trial. They were afraid that the substance might have a negative effect on the heart.

In the end, though, they were persuaded to carry out a trial. Finally, in 1899, Bayer marketed the new drug under the name "aspirin." It is estimated that about 100 billion aspirin tablets are now sold around the world every year.

The story of the world-famous fruit gum candies began in 1920 in the Bergstrasse in Kessenich, which at the time was still on the outskirts of Bonn. Hans Riegel who had trained as a confectioner and began his career with a company called Heinen (known after he became a partner as "Heinen & Riegel"), had, at the age of 27, set up his own business.

Riegel's start-up capital consisted of a sack of sugar, a marble slab, a stool, a brick-lined stove, a copper boiler, and a roller. And so the history of Haribo gummy bears began here in a little back kitchen in Kessenich.

In 1921, Riegel married his wife, Gertrud, and she became his first employee. Just one year later, Hans Riegel invented his dancing bears made of fruit gum, the forerunners of today's Gold Bears. Following the birth of his children, Hans (1923), Anita (1924), and Paul (1926), Riegel also began making licorice products. By 1930 the company already had 160 employees.

Following the early death of their father in 1945, brothers Hans and Paul took over the company, and even though the design and the advertising posters (a poster from 1960 is shown here) kept changing, the bears from Bonn remained part of the lives of generations of children.

Nowadays, the company also makes other fruit gum products at numerous production sites worldwide. The best sellers, though, are still the Gold Bears, of which over 100 million are made around the world every day. If all the Gold Bears produced in a year were placed end to end, the line would extend for 100,000 miles, the equivalent of 4 times round the world.

When asked what drove him as a child to make his first discoveries and inventions, Artur Fischer once replied: "You have to be encouraged from an early age to be curious and creative." For example, when Artur Fischer was 8 years old, he wanted to make a helicopter out of wood. He took a piece of wood to make the rotor, drilled a hole in it, and fastened a crank handle from the scrap yard to it. When he had finished making it, he turned the handle, and nothing happened. But giving up was out of the question for him.

After 1945, Fischer found an empty workshop near Tumlingen in the northern Black Forest and set up his own business: "I scrounged some planks from some local foresters and made myself a workbench," he once said. Soon he managed to make his first small invention, which solved an everyday problem in the post-war years: electricity was available, but matches were hard to come by, so he designed an electric firelighter. He and his wife, Rita, sold these in exchange for butter, eggs, or ham, or swapped them for tools. Gradually the small business in Waldachtal in Baden-Württemberg began to grow.

It was by chance that Fischer stumbled across his next innovation. During the Christmas of 1948, he wanted to take a family photo with his 6-month-old daughter, Margot. The photographer he had commissioned intended to set light to a bag filled with flash powder. The shooting flame would illuminate the room. Fischer was uneasy about that. He sent the photographer away–and invented the flash bulb. As he once said: "I knew nothing about photography. But I knew that it was nonsense to hang a flash powder lamp up on a cord and light it with a match, then set up the camera, open the shutter and expect people to smile nicely."

However, what made Artur Fischer legendary was his wall anchor. First of all, Artur Fischer invented a new kind of plastic. Until then, wall anchors had been made of wood and were not very strong. One Saturday in 1958, Fischer was tinkering with his file, saw, and drill, and he made the first prototype. Just a few days later, a machine in his factory spewed out a batch of gray wall anchors. They remain to this day Artur Fischer's most successful invention. Billions of these small, ribbed plastic components are pushed into walls and ceilings worldwide and, apart from a few minor modifications, they are still made in exactly the same way as they were in 1958. Here is a picture of the fischer Duopower, a 2-part wall anchor.

Fischer's inventions even reached children's playrooms, in the form of the construction toy fischertechnik, originally developed in 1964 as a Christmas present for the children of his business partners. It was so popular that in 1965 the decision was made to market his invention as a building-block construction set. At Christmas 1965, the inventor Artur Fischer (1919–2016) donated the first 1000 sets to the "Aktion Sorgenkind" children's charity. A fischertechnik set is still a classic children's present today, for example this Dynamic XM marble run, newly developed in 2018.

The Pointer Telegraph
In the middle of the 19th century, electricity brought the opportunity to entirely revolutionize the way messages could be sent. Werner von Siemens recognized this possibility and in 1846 designed an electric pointer telegraph which worked reliably and was regarded as superior to previous devices of that kind. This innovation formed the basis for the company called "Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske," which he founded on October 1, 1847 in Berlin with precision engineer Johann Georg Halske.

The First Workshop
The "Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske" company went into production on October 12, 1847. At first, it employed 10 people. They were mainly locksmiths and mechanics who had to be retrained to build the telegraph devices. The company received so many orders that the workforce had doubled by 1849.

The First Marriage
On October 1, 1852, Werner von Siemens married Mathilde Drumann, the daughter of a professor from Königsberg. The following year their son Arnold (right) was born, the first of 4 children. At the end of July 1855, his brother Wilhelm (2nd from the left) was born. Both sons would later join the management team at Siemens & Halske.

The Dynamo Machine
In 1866, Werner von Siemens discovered the dynamo-electric principle and built the first dynamo machine. This device was able to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy very economically. The invention laid the foundation for heavy-current electrical engineering. From the 1880s, the generation and transmission of electrical energy developed extremely fast, largely thanks to the influence of innovations by Siemens, and production throughout the whole electrical industry was changed forever.

The Second Marriage
Werner von Siemens married twice. Following the death of his first wife, Mathilde, in July 1869 he married his distant cousin, Antonie. Their daughter, Hertha, was born one year later, and their son, Carl Friedrich, in 1872. The latter was "company boss" at Siemens from 1919 until his death in 1941. On December 6, 1892, Werner von Siemens died of pneumonia in Berlin. He was buried at the Alter Luisenfriedhof cemetery in Charlottenburg and his remains were later moved to the Siemens family plot in the Südwestkirchhof Stahnsdorf cemetery, south-west of Berlin.

The idea dated right back to the end of the 1970s, when it was suggested that music signals could be sent over telephone wires. It became a reality from 1987, when the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits formed a research partnership. This picture shows one of the first real-time encoders, which was invented in the department of Technical Electronics. It generated so much heat that the device was fitted with large fans, with the result that its developers nicknamed it the "helicopter." This real-time encoder is the forefather of today's MP3 players.

The ASPEC 91
ASPEC (Adaptive Spectral Perceptual Coding) devices were invented in 1991 for the first commercial application of what would later become the MP3 process. It was in 1991 that the research and development work was finally approved by MPEG, the international "Moving Pictures Expert Group," a committee which aimed to standardize audio and video file formats. The committee defined the specification for the MPEG-1 Audio Layer III format. In 1995, the researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute decided to use what had been the standard designator, .bit, but the file ending .mp3. So it’s curious that the abbreviation actually stands for "movie picture 3," even though it is used for audio files.

Although the industry was initially skeptical about the new format, as PCs became more and more powerful and with the growth of the internet and, later, the development of smartphones, its triumphant progress became unstoppable. The basic principle is that, in the compression process, MP3 makes use of the psychoacoustic effects of human sound perception: all the sounds and signals that are not perceptible to the human ear are eliminated, with the result that the music files are about 10 times more compact than the original and take up considerably less storage space. A 32 GB MP3 player can hold around 8,000 songs each lasting about 3:30 to 4:00 minutes. The total playing time is approximately 3 weeks.