Machine powerhouse Germany finally wants to embrace the future

In the face of Germany's lagging tech innovations, its Chancellor Olaf Scholz has called for "a decade of investment” to modernise the economy, with a focus on digitalisation and green technology — Bloomberg

After years of tinkering in a Bavarian research lab in the 1980s, electrical engineering student Karlheinz Brandenburg and his professor arranged a meeting to pitch a promising innovation.

Grundig AG, once Europe’s biggest maker of radios, sent two engineers for a demo at the university’s tiny audio lab on the outskirts of Nuremberg. While mildly intrigued, they passed on funding the research, saying they didn’t see a way to use it.

"Come back to us once this works well enough that even the most critical listeners can’t distinguish it from the original signal,” Brandenburg recalled them saying.