Holy Roman Empire / Germany: Notable Scientists, Mathematicians, Inventors, Explorers, and Cartographers

Organized chronologically by death date / date of publication

1200 - 1285 - St. Albertus Magnus (All Facts)

• German Scientist and Encyclopedist

• He classified plants by their structures

1366 - 1405 - Conrad Keyser (All Facts)

• German Military Engineer

1405 - Conrad Keyser: Bellifortis (All Facts)

• Technical treatise on military engineering and ballistics, the most famous of those which abounded in Germany in the (early) 1400s

1393 - 1406 - Johannes Gutenberg (All Facts)

• German Inventor and Craftsman

  • He was from Mainz

• He invented the movable-type printing press / movable printing characters, which

  • enabled a much faster rate of printing compared to its preexisting East Asian (Korean) counterpart

  • while the use of a press for printing was not new, he made it so that making type did not have to involve laborious hours of carving from wood and handwriting bibles

  • spread across the world, having led to an information revolution and the unprecedented mass-spread of literature throughout Europe, with a profound impact on the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, and humanist movements

  • allowed accurate texts to be produced in great numbers

• His many contributions to printing include the

  • mechanical movable type and method of printing, based on the presses already in use for wine and paper-making, and used a revolutionary system of producing metal type-faces

    • it is possible that he designed his press along the lines of wine and linen presses

  • invention of a process for mass-producing movable type, in which the printer made type by pouring molten metal into punch-stamped molds, providing a limitless supply of letters

    • letters were cast in type metal, composed into sentences on a type stick, and set up as pages of type before being inked for the press

  • use of oil-based ink for printing books

  • invention of a wooden printing press similar to the agricultural screw presses of the period

• His first publication was a Bible with 42 lines on each page printed in a type-face (script) called “Gothic” (printed in Mainz)

  • His system was used for publishing bibles as well as religious tracts

  • His books were the first to be printed using his own method

  • However, no printed work bearing his name exists

• He ran into major financial difficulties during his invention process, having been

  • forced to borrow money heavily, particularly from a rich goldsmith and financier in his day named Johann Fust, who became increasingly impatient with the namesake and sued the namesake for the return of his 800 guilders

    • the courts found for Fust and it is he who made the fortune of sales from the printed Bibles and it was Fust’s Book of Psalms, based on the namesake system, who profited

• He also worked on a copper-based system of reproducing etchings on a mass basis

• He lived in Strasbourg for awhile

• He died in obscurity

1436 - 1476 - Regiomontanus (All Facts)

• German Astronomer

• He revised tables for navigation

1460 - 1498 - Johann Widmann (All Facts)

• German Mathematician

• In a book he published, he introduced the “+” and “-” signs to denote the operations of addition and subtraction, respectively

  • In doing so, he had not only advanced the operational symbolism of Diophantus, the great Greek mathematician, and Hindu scholars; but he greatly simplified matters for fellow mathematicians

  • This simplified the variety of signs and symbols employed rather idiosyncratically that denoted adding, subtracting, and other operations; which often took the form of abbreviated words

1459 - 1507 - Martin Behaim (All Facts)

• German Inventor, Cartographer, and Explorer

  • He was born in Lisbon

  • He was born into a family of merchants

• He invented the first known globe, called the “Erdapfel”

  • He constructed it during a visit to Nuremberg

  • He drew the outlines of the continents in color on a surface of fine parchment

  • He extensively copied from other maps

  • His completed work summarized the geographical knowledge of his time

• He spent most of his adult life in Portugal and the Azores Islands

  • He served King John II of Portugal as an explorer

  • He kept company with all the explorers who came his way

  • He claimed to have accompanied Diego Cao on his expedition to Africa

  • He was captured by English pirates one time, and was held prisoner for several years before being allowed to return to Portugal

1482 - 1511 - Matthias Ringmann (All Facts)

• German Cartographer

• He made the Universalis Cosmographia (Universal Cosmography) Map along with Martin Waldseemüller, which was the first map to have depicted the New World to be a distinct continent between Europe and Asia

  • They named America after Amerigo Vespucci, having accepted Vespucci’s dubious version of events of his discovery of the continent

  • The irony of this map was that Vespucci was given the principal credit for the discovery of America to a man whose principal talent seems to have been as a self-publicist

1470 - 1520 - Martin Waldseemüller (All Facts)

• German Cartographer

• He made the Universalis Cosmographia (Universal Cosmography) Map along with Martin Waldseemüller, which was the first map to have depicted the New World to be a distinct continent between Europe and Asia

  • They named America after Amerigo Vespucci, having accepted Vespucci’s dubious version of events of his discovery of the continent

  • The irony of this map was that Vespucci was given the principal credit for the discovery of America to a man whose principal talent seems to have been as a self-publicist

1485 - 1542 - Peter Heinlen (All Facts)

• German Inventor, Locksmith, Clockmaker and Watchmaker

  • He was from Nuremberg

• He invented the pocket-watch

  • He invented the timepiece that could be carried in the hand, the first being about four inches in diameter and three inches in depth

  • This invention was made possible by another innovation, the coiled mainspring, which he also seemed to have invent

  • At its first invention it was not without its faults, the most serious at the time being that force of the coiled mainspring inside was greater when it was fully wound, making time vary

• He invented the coiled mainspring (allegedly)

  • This was stressed when coiled

  • When it is wound up, it stores energy in the curved metal

  • As the coil unwinds, this energy is transmitted to an oscillating section of a watch by means of a mechanism called a verge escapement, a notched gear wheel shaped like a crown, to produce a regular pulse

1494 - 1555 - Georgius Agricola / Georg Bauer (All Facts)

• German Mineralogist and Metallurgist

1530 - Georgius Agricola / Georg Bauer: On the Nature of Metals / “De Re Metallica” (All Facts)

• Work of major importance in the field of mineralogy and mining techniques

• Work which was published in Silesia