Zyklon B?
mp3
The Berlin Wall, putting beach towels on recliners at the crack of dawn, sauerkraut, lederhosen, frankfurters, doner kebabs, hamburgers, donuts, cheese, iron gates, macerated cherries, aardvarks, the car, the bicycle, diesel, the moon, beer, lager, tamagotchi, the letter 'a', the number 25, serrated saw blades, cantilever bridges, ice cream, hand lotion, galoshes, the ipod, bilateral symmetry, the dawn, goths, the parachute, that sizzling noise meat makes when you fry it, hats, gloves, left socks, altitudes over 1,773 feet, postmodernism, and geese.
The US Army. Given the history, you might expect it to based on either the French or British model, but no, they mostly took notes from Prussia.
You might also think it's a very top-down authoritarian model for a military, but also no. That notion mostly comes from the legacy of Nazis. Both before and after, the German model of the Army is one of the least top-down authoritarian militaries.
The Haber process.
The Zweihänder and Aldi
Ps: I DuckDuckGo’ed this
The no card payment sign.
TV and TV propaganda
Gutenberg printing press
The Chinese invented movable type printing presses ~500 years before Gutenberg. The process was refined in Korea after that and made its way west. Gutenberg likely adapted and popularized the existing processes into the western industrialization movement.
We invented the car
The car, the bicycle and Spaghetti icecream are the three most notable inventions from Mannheim Germany.
I'm from the US and never heard of spaghetti ice cream. I just googled it and it looks pretty delicious!
hamburger
Though named after Hamburg, it was an American invention.
The blitzkrieg.
Brought to you by Pervitin.
Printed circuit boards. Printing press. Graph theory. Theory of relativity. Homeopathy.
You could've really stopped at "relativity".
Yes but I felt the need to include the evil/misguided minority of Germans, and I managed to do it without referencing certain 20th century events.
Printing press as well as the linotype.
If a German invented the Xerox they would've had the hat trick.
Those cool windows that Americans mistake for broken. I'm American and I want those windows... also a bidet.
What windows are you talking about? I tried searching for it.
Just need to combine those windows with built-in bug nets and we're solid.
I have several at home
Fanta?
V2 rockets
V1 rockets
V0 rockets
The rotary engine, also known as the Wankel engine
In fact, I've got a Wankel engine in my pants right now.
Socks in Sandals
Assault rifles
Nope. There where several "assault rifles" designed and built long before the StGew44 or the AK47 showed up.
The Italians even adopted one in the 1890s. But because Italian industry wasn't, let's just say not very capable at the time, only small numbers were produced. Even the Browning BAR, adopted in 1918, predates it and lasted far longer in service around the world.
If there is one thing the Germans did give to the world was the Reinheitsgebot in 1516. Because beer should only be made from water, barley, and hops. For that alone, they stand tallest in history.
Thanks for the interesting summary.
It really is true what they say. Post something wrong, and soon enough someone will correct you. Maybe you could even think of this as a clever way of crafting an effective question.
pretzels
SAP (maudits allemands !)
The hamburger, from the city of Hamburg.
And German chocolate cake from Deutschschokoladenkuchen
Wasn’t the hamburger invented in the US? There they had Frikadellen, which are arguably much better.
The woman that birthed Gutenberg
They invented Germany, that was a pretty big deal
Meh. Strongly derivative work, and they kept reinventing the wheel.
They didn’t invent East Germany.
Automatic Transmission
Gummy Bears.
that one really complicated way to turn bullets 180 degrees in a gun
(I know literally nothing but saw a meme on [email protected])kindergarten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindergarten
Kindergarten is even a German word would translate to Kinder= Kids Garten= Yard? So Kidsyard... Was funny for me as a German to learn that it actually is named Kindergarten in English..
Garten is garden, but sure, yard is fine too.
Germany
Zyklon B, E605
Frankfurters.
Flammable "Fertilizer."
Health insurance. Little known fact but it was actually invented not just before Google but before the entire internet.
Since folks have left me the easy ones, a fair number of things ending in "wurst," like Weißwurst.
Gelbwurst!
The bicycle
The car
The computer (arguably, with the Zuse Z3)Spoiler: I'm German.
They invented you
Not the computer, but the first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer (which would be a stage in computer hardware.)
It would be Babbage's machine as mechanical computers precede digital ones and only if we only allow nonspecific turing complete machines.
It was the first programmable, fully automatic, digital, turing-complete computer (although they only found out the last part after Zuse died).
So I'd argue, it was the first computer in the sense we understand and use the word today.
Gorilla Glass (the super strong glass used in most cell phone screens) was invented by East Germany after the war, before the wall fell.
Are you thinking of Superfest? Gorilla Glass is American and seems to predate Superfest.
Name something the Germans didn't invent.
Hitler
And what about Mozart?
The number zero, sanitation, statistics.
Humor
Inefficiency
Germans known inefficiency pretty damn well, I can tell you that much.
Civil engineering. And they've been confused at how the Italians beat them to it ever since
Noodles.
Tough one
Telephone
Greggs sausage rolls. Or are we counting the Anglo-Saxons as ex-pats?
Hard to say. There are soo many Germans, who knows what they’ve googled!
Leiderhosen
Everyone knows they invented the Haber-Bosch process. Pretty important shit.
And Haber of Haber-Bosch fame also invented using poisonous gas as a weapon in WW1.
Don't get me started on the Haber process. My students will tell you that I can and will go on for half an hour about how it prolonged WW1 and is one of the first commercial processes to make use of Le Chateliers principle.
Also, probably best not to spend too much time idolizing Fritz Haber,
as I'm pretty certain he went on to become a staunch supporter of Hitler.edit: I mixed up Haber with someone else, but his research was foundational in developing many German chemical weapons, including Zyklon BEdit 2: probably Richard Kuhn who fell into line and fired Jewish coworkers at the direction of the Nazis or Herman Kolbe who was an outspoken German nationalist and anti-Semite. I use all three of them as examples of prominent scientists behaving badly in my O-Chem course.
Really a fascinating bit of science history
Communism
Relatedly: the pension. (Before implementing the state pension, Bismarck probably saw nightmares that involved red and black banners.)
mp3
and then they patented it. the patents expired, but that doesn't make mp3 not suck
Modern physics.
Nuclear physics.
Jet engines?
No I think the UK beat them by a few years but they had them in planes earlier.
Rockets
Wasn't that china?
China invented fireworks around 1k years ago, but Germany made the first one that went to space (the V2, the same one they used to bomb a bunch of places in WWII), and scientists from Germany helped to develop rockets a lot further after Operation Paperclip
"I know a little German.. He's standing over there! "
Nowadays we invent things by describing the thing in Chatgibidy instead.
Chatskibidi?
everything that germany invented before google existed.
German ingenuity really fell off after they were done with the warmongering
The vacuum pump?
Diesel engine, Fischer-Tropsch, Homeopathy.
Rigid (as in using a solid frame to keep shape instead of gas pressure) airships? Unless there's an earlier example of that than the ones Zeppelin made that I'm not thinking of
The saxophone
Sorry, Adolphe Sax was from Belgium
Volkswagen, puma, Adidas, aldi, lidl...
Those are brands, not inventions. However, Otto, Benz and Diesel were all Germans, so modern cars along with both common types of ICEs were invented by Germans.
