It is no surprise that a country which gave the world Audi, Siemens and Adidas is the same country that invented the MP3 player technology. Yes that’s right, it was the German company ‘Fraunhofer Gesellschaft’ which developed the MP3 Player that we all rely upon today.

The project began rather modestly; funded by the German government in order to research the sending of music down telephone lines. The inventors named on the MP3 patent are Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein.

The inventors were helped considerably by Professor Dieter Seitzer from the renowned University of Erlangen. He assisted in the audio coding of the MP3 device, since for some time he had been researching the transfer of music across an ordinary telephone line. Born in 1933, he was educated at the University of Stuttgart, before going on to work for IBM in Zurich, Switzerland.

Another big name in the development of the technology is Karlheinz Brandenburg whose main research interests since 1977 had been in the field of compressing music. However the MP3 dream almost did not come true. The team continued to fail to produce an effective end product and the project nearly came to an end in 1991. Luckily the error was spotted and resolved just two days before they were about to give up.

In 1998 the group decided to patent the product, and as a result any manufacturer which uses the MP3 technology is legally bound to pay a fee to the ‘Fraunhofer Gesellschaft’, so I imagine this group of German men have become rather rich indeed, but according to a quote from the German magazine ‘Der Spiegel’, they have remained a rather modest bunch.

Karlheinz Brandenburg states:

I don’t care what the numbers are in my bank account, but I am satisfied with my work, the people I work with, and what it has brought about.