Germany unveils world’s first zero emissions hydrogen-powered passenger train
French company Alstom unveiled the first-ever passenger train powered completely by hydrogen at this week’s Berlin InnoTrans trade show.
Germany
Activists bring down the Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989.
The Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen in Germany begins research leading to invention of the MP3
By using MPEG audio coding, MP3s shrink down the original sound data from a CD by a factor of 12, without losing sound quality.
Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invent the Haber-Bosch Process allowing for mass-scale production of ammonia-based fertilizer
The Haber-Bosch process, is an artificial nitrogen fixation process and is the main industrial procedure for the production of ammonia today.
Gaston Planté invents the lead acid battery, the first rechargeable battery
Planté’s first model consisted of two lead sheets separated by rubber strips and rolled into a spiral. His batteries were first used to power the lights in train carriages while stopped at a station.
German inventor Karl von Drais invents the bicycle
In 1817, Drais debuted a two-wheeled vehicle, known by many names throughout Europe, including Draisienne, dandy horse and hobby horse.
The Holy Roman Emperor Francis II founds the Austrian Empire
The Austrian Empire was a Central European multinational great power from 1804 to 1867, created by proclamation out of the realms of the Habsburgs.
The school lunch movement begins in Europe
The first school lunches were thought to be served in 1790 in Munich, Germany, by an American-born physicist, Benjamin Thompson, also known as Count Rumford. In Munich, Thompson founded the Poor People’s Institute, which employed both adults and children to make uniforms for the German Army. They were fed and clothed for their work, and the children were taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. Years later, Thompson would feed 60,000 people a day from his soup kitchen in London.
German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz demonstrates integral calculus for the first time
Leibniz is credited, along with Sir Isaac Newton, with the discovery of calculus (differential and integral calculus). According to Leibniz’s notebooks, a critical breakthrough occurred on 11 November 1675, when he employed integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the graph of a function y = f(x).
Johannes Kepler publishes his three laws of planetary motion
Kepler’s work improved the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus, explaining how the planets’ speeds varied, and using elliptical orbits rather than circular orbits with epicycles.