The discovery of the nuclear chain reaction enabled the construction of atomic bombs and nuclear power plants—something never intended by the scientists.

When in about 1800 Bavaria urgently needed money, Georg von Reichenbach founded a factory for scientific instruments and started building precision theodilites to precisely survey the state in order to increase the taxes on land and buildings.

Geologists from the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) are responsible for deciding how the Earth’s history should be categorized into epochs and eras based on geological deposition in the earth.

In the 1980s, the findings of Paul Crutzen and his team were used as the basis for the Montreal Protocol’s ban on the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), identified as the primary cause for the hole in the ozone layer.