Today, 125 years ago on 23 February 1893, Rudolf Diesel received the patent for the diesel engine in Berlin. What is interesting from a Swiss point of view, is the connection between Rudolf Diesel and Maschinenfabrik Sulzer AG in Winterthur, where the young inventor had already completed two internships.
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When demand for prostheses increased massively in war-torn Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Pierre Ballif (1775–1831), personal dentist to the King of Prussia in Berlin, developed new technology and in doing so created the basis for the further development of artificial limbs. Read more
Holiday time is travel time. And the eternal question arises: Where shall we go? Today’s possibilities are countless and, depending on the destination and means of travel, don’t even need to cost that much. As early as 1900, Europeans had, as a result of technological advances, a wide choice of travel destinations to which they could head by ship or train.
Switzerland must have seemed like paradise to him. After one and a half years in POW camp in Germany, Jean Chopin, a twenty-five-year-old French infantryman, was allowed to leave for neutral Switzerland in the spring of 1916. Finally, after an interruption of almost three years, he was able to take up his academic studies again in the autumn of 1917. Read more
During the Second World War, the Swiss government actively included ETH Zurich in its plans to promote an autonomous national aviation industry in Switzerland. The Federal Office of Aviation (now the Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA)) commissioned Professor Eduard Read more