Germans and Innovation

This is an essay over a favorite topic of mine.....innovation.

There's a lesser seen German show on public TV (usually regional networks) that uses the term 'Dings Vom Dach' in the title (meaning 'Things from the Roof').  It's an interesting game-show piece where the moderator walks in with some odd device, and shows it to four promi-guests, and you have to guess what the purpose is.

The hype to the show is that these objects....some going back to the 1700s/1800s/1900s....are engineering marvels.  Some German will sit down and analyze a problem to the ninth degree, and invent in the garage or shop....something that requires a lot of concentration and thought.

It's interesting to me over the variety of 'dings' which pop up on the show, and have been outpaced or innovation has passed these items. 

Few people ever sit down and analyze the history of German thought, engineering, and innovative nature.  I sat in a car three years ago, a Mercedes, that had a sensor device on the windshield that would sense raindrops and automatically turn on the wiper.  German-made and developed.

The gasoline-powered motorcycle?  German idea.

The turbo-jet?  German idea.

The Wenkel-engine?  German idea.

The concept of biodiesel?  German idea.

The Richter scale?  German idea.

The nuclear fission concept?  German idea.

The clarinet?  German idea.

Cruise missiles and ballistic missiles?  German idea.

The glue stick?  German idea.

The electric drip-coffee maker?  German idea.

The printing press?  German idea.

There's probably a listing of over 10,000 concepts, inventions, and ideas....which go back to some German guy in a lab, garage, or workshop.

Preoccupied with innovation?  I tend to think it's a preoccupation with the process of how things work, or why something can't be developed.  You can imagine a guy standing there and looking at how concrete is 'dumped' and the enormous amount of effort it is to carry wet concrete to higher floors, and then asking....why can't I pump the concrete up with air pressure?  Max Giese came to that conclusion, and invented the idea in 1928. 

The Hellschreiber (the original dot-matrix printer) was one of those ideas.  Rudolf Hell was sort of a 'Thomas Edison' of minor gadgets in the 1920s to 1980 era. He already had the patent listed for the dot-matrix concept in 1929.

Across the nation, every single day....there's probably a hundred-thousand Germans working on some process that would shock people in the decade to come.  Some will succeed....some will fail.