19th-century German inventors

Wilhelm Emil Fein (16 January 1842 – 6 October 1898) was a German inventor. He invented the worldwide first portable electric drill.

Eugen Baumann (12 December 1846 – 3 November 1896) was a German chemist. He was one of the first people to create polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and, together with Carl Schotten, he discovered the Schotten-Baumann reaction.

August Müller (1864 – 1949), born in Mönchengladbach, was a medical student at the University of Kiel, Germany, and a pioneer in the manufacture of contact lenses. In 1889, he presented at the university his doctoral thesis titled Eyeglasses and corneal lenses in which he described his efforts to grind scleral lenses from blown glass. Refinements in his process led him to be able to correct his own severe -14 dioptre myopia to within 0.50 D.Müller's compatriot Adolf Fick had published his work on contact lenses earlier in 1887, but his lenses were heavy and could only be worn for short periods. Müller's lenses were lighter and shaped to match the curved contour of the cornea. He suggested that the lens would remain in place on the cornea due to capillary action lubricated by the tear film.
Müller called his development Hornhautlinsen or 'corneal lenses'. His efforts to develop a new corrective lens were ultimately unsuccessful, since a patient could only tolerate the lens bearing down heavily on the sclera for half an hour, less than those of Fick. Moreover, it had to be inserted underwater to prevent trapping air bubbles, and cocaine administered to anaesthetise the eye, but he did however lay the groundwork for later researchers and his ideas and recommendations on fit, tear flow and rounded edges still form the basis for contact lens fitting today.In 1932, Müller donated three lenses to the German Museum in Munich. These were the same lenses that he had discussed in his thesis.

Carl August von Steinheil (12 October 1801 – 14 September 1870) was a German physicist, inventor, engineer and astronomer.

Gustave Albin Whitehead (born Gustav Albin Weisskopf; 1 January 1874 – 10 October 1927) was an aviation pioneer who emigrated from Germany to the United States where he designed and built gliders, flying machines, and engines between 1897 and 1915. Controversy surrounds published accounts and Whitehead's own claims that he flew a powered machine successfully several times in 1901 and 1902, predating the first flights by the Wright Brothers in 1903.
Much of Whitehead's reputation rests on a newspaper article which was written as an eyewitness report and describes his powered and sustained flight in Connecticut on 14 August 1901. Over a hundred newspapers in the U.S. and around the world soon repeated information from the article. Several local newspapers also reported on other flight experiments that Whitehead made in 1901 and subsequent years. Whitehead's aircraft designs and experiments were described or mentioned in Scientific American articles and a 1904 book about industrial progress. His public profile faded after about 1915, however, and he died in relative obscurity in 1927.
In the 1930s, a magazine article and book asserted that Whitehead had made powered flights in 1901–02, and the book includes statements from people who said that they had seen various Whitehead flights decades earlier. These published accounts triggered debate among scholars, researchers, and aviation enthusiasts. Mainstream historians have consistently dismissed the Whitehead flight claims, which Orville Wright later described as 'mythical'.
Researchers have studied and attempted to copy Whitehead aircraft. Since the 1980s, enthusiasts in the U.S. and Germany have built and flown replicas of Whitehead's "Number 21" machine using modern engines and modern propellers, and with fundamental changes to the aircraft structure and control systems.

Wilhelm Kolle (born 2 November 1868 in Lerbach near Osterode am Harz, died 10 May 1935) was a German bacteriologist and hygienist. He served as the second director of the Royal Institute for Experimental Therapy, succeeding its founder, the Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich. He was also the original author, with Heinrich Hetsch, of the famous book Experimental Bacteriology, one of the most authoritative works in microbiology in the first half of the 20th century.
Following studies of medicine at the universities of Göttingen, Halle and Würzburg, he became an assistant to Robert Koch at the Institut für Infektionskrankheiten (Institute for Infectious Diseases) in Berlin (1893–97). In 1897–98 he performed research of rinderpest and leprosy in South Africa, and in 1900, on behalf of the Egyptian government, studied rinderpest in Sudan.
In 1901 he became departmental head at the Institut für Infektionskrankheiten, followed by an appointment as professor of hygiene and bacteriology at the University of Bern (1906). As a military physician and hygienist during World War I, he was highly successful in vaccination against diphtheria and cholera. In 1917, he became director of the Royal Institute for Experimental Therapy and of the Georg Speyer House in Frankfurt am Main.
Kolle made numerous contributions in the fields of serology, microbiology and chemotherapy. He is credited with the development of an anti-meningococcus serum, as well as a vaccine against rinderpest. He introduced an improved Salvarsan preparation for treatment of syphilis, and in 1896 developed a heat-inactivated cholera vaccine that was used extensively during the 20th century.He was the father of the painter Helmut Kolle (1899–1931).

Max Skladanowsky (30 April 1863 – 30 November 1939) was a German inventor and early filmmaker. Along with his brother Emil, he invented the Bioscop, an early movie projector the Skladanowsky brothers used to display a moving picture show to a paying audience on 1 November 1895, shortly before the public debut of the Lumière Brothers' Cinématographe in Paris on 28 December 1895.

Franz Xaver Gabelsberger (9 February 1789, Munich - 4 January 1849, Munich) was a German stenographer; the inventor of Gabelsberger shorthand.

Robert Bosch (23 September 1861 – 12 March 1942) was a German industrialist, engineer and inventor, founder of Robert Bosch GmbH.

Oskar Messter (21 November 1866 – 6 December 1943) was a German inventor and film tycoon in the early years of cinema. His firm Messter Film was one of the dominant German producers before the rise of UFA, into which it was ultimately merged.