Six Swiss Inventions and the Surprising Stories Behind Them

Velcro (George de Mestral, idea in 1941), milk chocolate (Daniel Peter, Vevey, 1875), cellophane (Jacques Edwin Brandenberger, 1908) and LSD (Albert Hofmann at Sandoz in Basel, 1938 and 1943) are Swiss inventions. The Swiss Army knife began as the soldier's knife Karl Elsener first supplied to the army in 1891. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN in Geneva in 1989, by the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee.

Switzerland likes to say it has no raw materials, only ideas. Here are six of them. Look closely and you will see that almost none started as a plan: most began with an accident, an annoyance or a walk.

1. Velcro: a dog full of burrs

In 1941 George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer and keen mountaineer, came home from a hunting trip with his trousers and his dog's fur covered in burdock burrs. Under the microscope he saw hundreds of tiny hooks. He filed a Swiss patent in 1951, received it in 1954, and named the result after two French words, velours (velvet) and crochet (hook) (WIPO). Ten years from the walk to the patent filing. Very Swiss.

2. Milk chocolate: a candle maker in Vevey

Daniel Peter started out making candles in Vevey in 1856. With backing from his father-in-law, François-Louis Cailler, he moved into chocolate, and in 1875 he invented the recipe for milk chocolate. His company later merged with Nestlé, in 1929 (Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, in German). Yes, that Cailler.

3. Cellophane: a glass of red wine

Jacques Edwin Brandenberger, a chemist born in Zurich in 1872, watched a clumsy waiter spill a bottle of red wine over a tablecloth in a Paris restaurant in 1900, and wanted a fabric that would shrug off stains. His search led him to a process for thin, transparent viscose film, which he developed in 1908 at a textile works in France. He named it from cellulose and the Greek word for transparent (swissinfo, in German). A Swiss invention, made in France, inspired by a Paris waiter.

4. The Swiss Army knife: a workshop in Ibach

Karl Elsener, a cutler, opened a workshop for knives and surgical instruments in Ibach, in the canton of Schwyz, in 1884. The turning point came in 1891, when he first supplied the Swiss Army with its soldier's knife; in 1897 the firm made its first officer's knife. When stainless steel arrived, the company name became the one you know: Victorinox, with «inox» for stainless (Historical Dictionary of Switzerland).

5. LSD: a chemist on a bicycle

At Sandoz in Basel, Albert Hofmann was studying compounds from ergot, a grain fungus, in search of a circulatory stimulant. He first made LSD in 1938 and shelved it (House of Switzerland). On 16 April 1943 he absorbed a trace by accident and felt strange. Three days later, on 19 April, he took 250 micrograms on purpose and rode his bicycle home, a day now remembered as Bicycle Day (Swiss National Museum). Please do not recreate this on the Basel tram.

6. The web: a physicist who wanted to share files

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN in Geneva, proposed a way for researchers at universities and institutes around the world to share information automatically. The first website ran on his own computer. On 30 April 1993 CERN made the web software freely available (CERN). So, is the web Swiss? It was made in Switzerland, by a Brit, at a European laboratory on the French border, and then given away to everyone. Perhaps that is the most Swiss part.

Notice the small problem, then fix it properly. That is the pattern in almost every story on this page.

And no, the cuckoo clock is not on this list. Here is why.