Quiz: Easy like Sunday morning

What have the Germans ever given us?

1. On January 29, 1886, this gentleman obtained a patent for his ‘Motorwagen’ in Karlsruhe, Germany. This was the world’s first automobile with a burning motor. As a kid he had helped out his single mother by developing photos for tourists. His goal in life was to have a ‘horseless carriage’, and till this day his name is synonymous with the most respected automobile brand in the world. Who was this inventor?

2. Dr. Gerhard Stalling was a German doctor who during World War I worked with soldiers who returned from the frontline, especially those blinded by poison gas. One day he noticed his German shepherd helping one of his patients to find a chair to sit down. This inspired him to start the world’s first school for what specific purpose in 1916?

3. Richard Assmann was a German doctor whose interest in aeronautics eventually led him to co-founding the field of aerology. He conducted human scientific ascents with balloons. In 1902, he discovered a layer of stratified temperatures. What did he discover that is also used to informally denote the highest level of something?

4. Friedrich Ludwig Hünefeld was a physician who discovered something in the body for the first time in 1840. Finding it in humans, earthworms and pigs he called the crystals ‘Blut roth’. What did he discover that is responsible for transporting oxygen in all vertebrates?

5. Franz Karl Achard was a chemist who for discovering how to acclimatise tobacco to Germany was handsomely rewarded by the king. Using that money he did research to devise a process which allowed him to produce a valuable commodity from the root of Beta vulgaris, which revolutionised the world. What did he produce from beets?

6. In 1901, Johannes Pfleger and Karl Heumann came up with a process to do industrial-scale synthesis of a particular dye. This distinctively blue dye had till then been extracted from a plant, but was a long and labour-intensive process, thus making this colour expensive. What colour dye did these two Germans give the world that is now the staple colour of denim?

7. Karl Lohmann discovered this organic compound in 1929 at the same time as Yellapragada Subba Rao. They had been looking to find an assay for phosphorus when they discovered this molecule that provides energy to drive almost all processes in a living cell. Known by a three-letter acronym, what molecule is this?