Austrian inventions and discoveries are objects, processes or techniques invented or discovered partially or entirely by a person born in

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

. In some cases, their Austrianess is determined by the fact that they were born in Austria, of non-Austrian people working in the country. Often, things discovered for the first time are also called "

inventions An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an i ...

", and in many cases, there is no clear line between the two. The following is a list of inventions or discoveries generally believed to be Austrian:

Astronomy

Cosmic ray Cosmic rays are high-energy particles or clusters of particles (primarily represented by protons or atomic nuclei) that move through space at nearly the speed of light. They originate from the Sun, from outside of the Solar System in our own ...

, discovery by

Victor Francis Hess Victor Franz Hess (; 24 June 188317 December 1964) was an Austrian-American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics, who discovered cosmic rays. Biography He was born to Vinzenz Hess and Serafine Edle von Grossbauer-Waldstätt, in Waldstein ...

(nobel prize)

Chemistry

Alkaline battery An alkaline battery (IEC code: L) is a type of primary battery where the electrolyte (most commonly potassium hydroxide) has a pH value above 7. Typically these batteries derive energy from the reaction between zinc metal and manganese dioxide, ...

Karl Kordesch Karl Kordesch (18 March 1922 – 12 January 2011) was an Austrian chemist and inventor, most notable for jointly inventing the alkaline battery. In 1953 he moved to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip. Life Kordesch was born in Vie ...

jointly co-inventor (together with Canadian Lewis Urry)

Cori cycle The Cori cycle (also known as the lactic acid cycle), named after its discoverers, Carl Ferdinand Cori and Gerty Cori, is a metabolic pathway in which lactate, produced by anaerobic glycolysis in muscles, is transported to the liver and convert ...

Carl Cori Carl Ferdinand Cori, ForMemRS (December 5, 1896 – October 20, 1984) was an Austrian-American biochemist and pharmacologist born in Prague (then in Austria-Hungary, now Czech Republic) who, together with his wife Gerty Cori and Argentine physio ...

and Gerti Cori *

Soman Soman (or GD, EA 1210, Zoman, PFMP, A-255, systematic name: ''O''-pinacolyl methylphosphonofluoridate) is an extremely toxic chemical substance. It is a nerve agent, interfering with normal functioning of the mammalian nervous system by inhibiti ...

Richard Kuhn Richard Johann Kuhn (; 3 December 1900 – 1 August 1967) was an Austrian-German biochemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1938 "for his work on carotenoids and vitamins". Biography Early life Kuhn was born in Vienna, Austr ...

(nobel prize), works on carotenoids and vitamins

Cuisine

* Kaiserschmarrn *

Mozartkugel A (; English: "Mozart ball"; ) is a small, round sugar confection made of pistachio, marzipan and nougat that is covered with dark chocolate. It was originally known as , created in 1890 by Salzburg confectioner Paul Fürst (1856–1941) and ...

by Paul Fürst Sachertorte2009

Sachertorte Sachertorte (, , ) is a chocolate cake, or torte of Austrian origin, invented by Franz Sacher, supposedly in 1832 for Prince Metternich in Vienna.Michael Krondl, ''Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert'', , 2011, p. 290: "my best guess i ...

Franz Sacher Franz Sacher (19 December 1816 – 11 March 1907) was an Austrian confectioner, best known as the inventor of the Sachertorte. Biography According to Sacher's son Eduard, in 1832 Austria's minister of foreign affairs, Prince Metternich, order ...

* Salzburger Nockerl

Geology

* Continent Gondwana by

Eduard Suess Eduard Suess (; 20 August 1831 - 26 April 1914) was an Austrian geologist and an expert on the geography of the Alps. He is responsible for hypothesising two major former geographical features, the supercontinent Gondwana (proposed in 1861) and t ...

Tethys Ocean The Tethys Ocean ( el, Τηθύς ''Tēthús''), also called the Tethys Sea or the Neo-Tethys, was a prehistoric ocean that covered most of the Earth during much of the Mesozoic Era and early Cenozoic Era, located between the ancient continents ...

by Eduard Suess

Information technology

Drum memory Drum memory was a magnetic data storage device invented by Gustav Tauschek in 1932 in Austria. Drums were widely used in the 1950s and into the 1960s as computer memory. For many early computers, drum memory formed the main working memory of ...

by Gustav Tauschek * Printed circuit board by

Paul Eisler Paul Eisler (1907 – 26 October 1992, London) was an Austrian inventor born in Vienna. Among his innovations were the printed circuit board. In 2012, ''Printed Circuit Design & Fab'' magazine named its Hall of Fame after Eisler. Early life and e ...

Media, Film and Television

Slow motion Slow motion (commonly abbreviated as slo-mo or slow-mo) is an effect in film-making whereby time appears to be slowed down. It was invented by the Austrian priest August Musger in the early 20th century. This can be accomplished through the use ...

August Musger Professor August Musger (February 10, 1868 – October 30, 1929) was an Austrian priest and physicist who is best remembered for his invention of slow motion. Invention Musger invented the slow motion technique using a mirrored drum as a synchron ...

Medicine

* Main

blood groups The term human blood group systems is defined by the International Society of Blood Transfusion (ISBT) as systems in the human species where cell-surface antigens—in particular, those on blood cells—are "controlled at a single gene locus or by ...

Karl Landsteiner Karl Landsteiner (; 14 June 1868 – 26 June 1943) was an Austrian-born American biologist, physician, and immunologist. He distinguished the main blood groups in 1900, having developed the modern system of classification of blood groups from ...

(nobel prize) co-discovered with Alexander S. Wiener *

Psychoanalysis PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might b ...

Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts ...

* Rhesus factor by Karl Landsteiner *

polio virus A poliovirus, the causative agent of polio (also known as poliomyelitis), is a serotype of the species ''Enterovirus C'', in the family of ''Picornaviridae''. There are three poliovirus serotypes: types 1, 2, and 3. Poliovirus is composed of an ...

. co-discovered by Karl Landsteiner (with

Constantin Levaditi Constantin Levaditi (1 August 1874 – 5 September 1953) was a Romanian physician and microbiologist, a major figure in virology and immunology, especially in the study of poliomyelitis and syphilis. Biography He was born in Galați. His fath ...

and

Erwin Popper Erwin Popper (9 December 1879 − 28 September 1955) was an Austrian physician, who, in 1909, along with Karl Landsteiner discovered the infectious character of poliomyelitis.Title of German publication: ''Landsteiner, K. und Popper, E.: Übertragun ...

) * Hand disinfection/

washing hands Hand washing (or handwashing), also known as hand hygiene, is the act of cleaning one's hands with soap or handwash and water to remove viruses/bacteria/microorganisms, dirt, grease, or other harmful and unwanted substances stuck to the hand ...

Ignaz Semmelweis Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (; hu, Semmelweis Ignác Fülöp ; 1 July 1818 – 13 August 1865) was a Hungarian physician and scientist, who was an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures. Described as the "saviour of mothers", he discovered that t ...

*Aspergers Syndrome (Hans Asperger)

Military

Blow forward Blow-forward is a firearm action where the propellant gas pressure and the friction of the bullet traveling down the bore drag the whole gun barrel forward to facilitate the opening of the breech. This forward barrel motion provides most of th ...

(

Steyr Mannlicher M1894 The Mannlicher M1894 was an early blow-forward semi-automatic pistol. General features The earliest Ferdinand Mannlicher pistol, manufactured by Fabrique D'Armes de Neuhausen, Switzerland, was designed to be self-loading and to use a special ...

) *

Glock Glock is a brand of polymer-Receiver (firearms), framed, Recoil operation#Short recoil operation, short recoil-operated, locked-breech semi-automatic pistols designed and produced by Austrian manufacturer Glock Ges.m.b.H., Glock Ges.m.b.H. The ...

, A brand of polymer-frame

semi-automatic pistols A semi-automatic pistol is a type of repeating single- chamber handgun ( pistol) that automatically cycles its action to insert the subsequent cartridge into the chamber (self-loading), but requires manual actuation of the trigger to actu ...

* Salvator Dormus, first patented semi-automatic pistol * AUG type automatic weapons: Aug A1, Aug Hbar, Aug A2, Aug A3, somewhat famous Austrian rifles, Low recoil + good accuracy.

Physics

Density functional theory Density-functional theory (DFT) is a computational quantum mechanical modelling method used in physics, chemistry and materials science to investigate the electronic structure (or nuclear structure) (principally the ground state) of many-body ...

Walter Kohn Walter Kohn (; March 9, 1923 – April 19, 2016) was an Austrian-American theoretical physicist and theoretical chemist. He was awarded, with John Pople, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to the unde ...

(1998 nobel prize of Chemistry) *

Schrödinger equation The Schrödinger equation is a linear partial differential equation that governs the wave function of a quantum-mechanical system. It is a key result in quantum mechanics, and its discovery was a significant landmark in the development of th ...

Erwin Schrödinger Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger (, ; ; 12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961), sometimes written as or , was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist with Irish citizenship who developed a number of fundamental results in quantum theo ...

Pauli exclusion principle In quantum mechanics, the Pauli exclusion principle states that two or more identical particles with half-integer spins (i.e. fermions) cannot occupy the same quantum state within a quantum system simultaneously. This principle was formulat ...

Wolfgang Pauli Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (; ; 25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics ...

Toys

* Altekruse Puzzle by Wilhelm Altekruse *

Snow globe A snow globe (also called a waterglobe, snowstorm, or snowdome) is a transparent sphere, traditionally made of glass, enclosing a miniaturized scene of some sort, often together with a model of a town, neighborhood, landscape or figure. The sph ...

by Erwin Perzy

Transportation

* Giesl ejector by

Adolph Giesl-Gieslingen Adolph Giesl-Gieslingen (7 September 1903 – 11 February 1992) was an Austrian locomotive designer and engineer. Giesl-Gieslingen was born in 1903 in Trient, Tirol, and studied at the Technical College in Vienna. In 1924 he published a technical ...

Internal combustion engine An internal combustion engine (ICE or IC engine) is a heat engine in which the combustion of a fuel occurs with an oxidizer (usually air) in a combustion chamber that is an integral part of the working fluid flow circuit. In an internal c ...

Siegfried Marcus Siegfried Samuel Marcus (; 18 September 1831 – 1 July 1898) was a German inventor. Marcus was born of Jewish descent in Malchin, in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He made the first petrol-powered vehicle in 1864, while living ...

Kaplan turbine The Kaplan turbine is a propeller-type water turbine which has adjustable blades. It was developed in 1913 by Austrian professor Viktor Kaplan, who combined automatically adjusted propeller blades with automatically adjusted wicket gates to ach ...

by Viktor Kaplan *

Rumpler Tropfenwagen The Rumpler Tropfenwagen ("Rumpler drop car", named after its raindrop shape) was a car developed by Austrian engineer Edmund Rumpler. The Tropfenwagen Aerodynamics Rumpler, born in Vienna, was known as a designer of aircraft when at the 1921 Be ...

Edmund Rumpler Edmund Elias Rumpler (4 January 1872 – 7 September 1940) was an Austrian automobile and aircraft designer. Born in Vienna, then Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Austria),Wise 1974, p.1964 he worked mainly in Germany.Lyons 1988, p.73 An automo ...

* Valier-Heylandt Rak 7 by

Max Valier Max Valier (9 February 1895 – 17 May 1930) was an Austrian rocketry pioneer. He was a leading figure in the world's first large-scale rocket program, Opel-RAK, and helped found the German ''Verein für Raumschiffahrt'' (VfR – "Spacefligh ...

Miscellaneous

* The Turk, a chess-playing automaton and Wolfgang von Kempelen's Speaking Machine by Wolfgang von Kempelen

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Austrian Inventions And Discoveries Inventions and discoveries Lists of inventions or discoveries