High Five: German inventions that changed the world

The idea for a coffee filter was born in a kitchen in Dresden in 1908. Annoyed by coffee grounds in the cup, Melitta Bentz, a housewife, took a tin can, punched holes in the bottom and put blotting paper from her son's exercise book inside. After trying it out successfully, she applied for a patent. Generations of coffee lovers have been sipping their coffee grounds-free ever since.

In 1896, the entrepreneur Oscar Troplowitz wanted to develop a new adhesive bandage. But his invention was so strong that it peeled the skin off, so it was put on the market for sealing bicycle tires first, and later, in 1936, as a general-purpose adhesive tape. The name "Tesa," the abbreviation of the secretary Elsa Tesmer, represents all varieties of tape in Germany.

In 1987 researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen developed a process which shrank a music file to a fraction of its size without audible loss of quality. In a few short years, the mp3 format revolutionized the music industry. Now hundreds of albums can be stored on any smartphone.

The dynamo-electric principle was long known, but Werner von Siemens was the first to apply it in a machine in 1866. With a coiled wire and a magnet, electricity was not only easy to produce but could also be transported to all parts of the country. The Siemens company became a global corporation, and today the name is synonymous for electrical engineering worldwide.

Developed by the engineer Konrad Zuse in 1941, the Z3 was as big as three closets, even though it could only do four basic arithmetic operations and root extraction. It took 0.5 seconds for addition and 3 seconds to do a simple multiplication. The Z3 was the first computer to work with the binary number system (0 and 1), and is therefore considered the forerunner of all modern computers.