Patriarchen

Who invented it? With bold ideas and great deeds: Alex Capus lightly traces the life paths of ten great inventors and innovators. At the end of 1886, Julius Maggi notes down the recipe for a bouillon extract. Capus follows him from the beginnings to his brief final days in the arms of a beautiful Parisian woman. He tells how the Frankfurt-born Heinrich Nestle became the Swiss Henri Nestlé and what a pair of stylish Parisian ladies' boots, which Carl Franz Bally brought back for his wife from a business trip in 1850, has to do with the construction of the world's largest shoe factory. They, along with the other seven, shared one thing in common: they were all impetuous, persistent, open-minded - and had a keen instinct for change and innovation.