text:
New Discoveries and Inventions Recent Discoveries and Invention Pennsylvania Inventions and Discoveries Newest Inventions and Discoveries Inventions and Discoveries Timeline 1919 Inventions and Discoveries Scientist Inventions and Discoveries 1967 Inventions and Discoveries
| New Discoveries and Inventions | Recent Discoveries and Invention | Pennsylvania Inventions and Discoveries | Newest Inventions and Discoveries | Inventions and Discoveries Timeline | 1919 Inventions and Discoveries | Scientist Inventions and Discoveries | 1967 Inventions and Discoveries |
| List_of_Dutch_inventions_and_discoveries | List_of_French_inventions_and_discoveries | List_of_Indian_inventions_and_discoveries | 11th_century | 18th_century | List_of_Chinese_discoveries | 17th_century | 16th_century | Thomas_Edison | 15th_century | 2011_in_science | 2012_in_science | List_of_Chinese_inventions | Age_of_Discoveries | History_of_Holland | Age_of_Enlightenment | List_of_inventions_in_the_medieval_Islamic_world | List_of_Irish_inventions_and_discoveries | Pope_Pius_IX | 2013_in_science |
|Part of a series on the
|History of the Netherlands
|Netherlands portal
Dutch-speaking people (Dutch, Dutch-Frisian and Flemish) have a long history in inventing and discovering. In the Age of Discovery and Scientific Revolution, the Dutch, aided by their skills in shipbuilding, shipping, seamanship (navigation), drawing/painting, map making (cartography and uranography), lens-making (invention of optical devices), invention of timekeeping devices (pendulum clock and spiral balance spring watch), water management (drainage technology, flood control and canal building), land reclamation, agriculture (horticulture, gardening and animal husbandry), food preservation/processing (gibbing and sugar refining), printing/publishing, diplomacy (international law), finance and trade, traveled to every corner of the world and left their language embedded in names of places they visited, many of which are still in use today. At one time, there was not an inhabited continent in the world that did not have a Dutch foothold on it or at least some tenuous connection to the Netherlands. Australia, for instance, the last inhabited continent to be discovered (authentically) in 1606, was never a Dutch possession, yet they were the first to map the coastline (indisputably) and this explains why so many surrounding areas, from Tasmania to New Zealand, have Dutch-origin names. In fact, before it acquired its present name, Australia was originally known as New Holland. During the seventeenth century, the Dutch navigators and explorers have charted of almost two thirds of the Australian coastline. The VOC's cartographers were able to map most of Australia's coastline except the east coast which still remained a mystery until it was discovered by James Cook in 1770. Dutch exploratory voyages such as those led by Willem Barentsz, Willem Janszoon, Henry Hudson, Abel Tasman and Jacob Roggeveen revealed vast new territories to Europeans. Also, the Dutch explorers and cartographers like Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser, Frederick de Houtman, Petrus Plancius and Jodocus Hondius were pioneers in systematic mapping of largely unknown southern hemisphere heavens in the late 16th century.
The Netherlands, despite its very small size and population, had a considerable part in making of the modern world. In the Early Modern period (Dutch Golden Age in particular), The Netherlands and its people made a significant impact on world history, including North America (New Netherland, Plymouth Colony, Thirteen Colonies, United States), Caribbean (Netherlands Antilles), South America (Brazil, Suriname), Sub-Saharan Africa (South Africa, Mauritius), Iberian Peninsula (Spanish Empire, Portuguese Empire), the British Isles (Great Britain, Ireland), Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway-Svalbard, Sweden), Slavic countries (Imperial Russia, Poland), Islamic countries (Ottoman Empire, Morocco), South Asia (India, Sri Lanka), Far East (Indonesia, Taiwan, Joseon Korea, Tokugawa Japan) and Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, Easter Island).
Often, things which are discovered for the first time, are also called "inventions", and in many cases, there is no clear line between the two. The following list is composed of objects, processes or techniques that were invented by or discovered by people from the Netherlands and Dutch-speaking people from the former Southern Netherlands. Until the fall of Antwerp (1584–1585), the Dutch and Flemish were generally seen as one people.
In general, De Stijl proposed ultimate simplicity and abstraction, both in architecture and painting, by using only straight horizontal and vertical lines and rectangular forms. Furthermore, their formal vocabulary was limited to the primary colours, red, yellow, and blue, and the three primary values, black, white, and grey. De Stijl's principal members were the painters Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), Vilmos Huszár (1884–1960), and Bart van der Leck (1876–1958), and the architects Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964), Robert van 't Hoff (1888–1979), and J.J.P. Oud (1890–1963).
The Amsterdam School (Dutch: Amsterdamse School) is a style of architecture that arose from 1910 through about 1930 in The Netherlands. The Amsterdam School movement is part of international Expressionist architecture, sometimes linked to German Brick Expressionism.
The Rietveld Schröder House or Schröder House (Rietveld Schröderhuis in Dutch) in Utrecht was built in 1924 by Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld. It is a listed monument since 1976 and UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000. The Rietveld Schröder House constitutes both inside and outside a radical break with all architecture before it. There is little distinction between interior and exterior space. The rectilinear lines and planes flow from outside to inside, with the same colour palette and surfaces. Inside there is no static accumulation of rooms, but a dynamic, changeable open zone. The house is one of the best known examples of De Stijl architecture and arguably the only true De Stijl building.
The Dutch door (also known as stable door or half door) is a type of door divided horizontally in such a fashion that the bottom half may remain shut while the top half opens. The initial purpose of this door was to keep animals out of farmhouses, or keep children inside, while allowing light and air to filter through the open top. This type of door was common in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century and appears in Dutch paintings of the period. They were also commonly found in the Dutch cultural areas of New York, New Jersey (before the American Revolution) and South Africa.
The Red and Blue Chair is a chair designed in 1917 by Gerrit Rietveld. It represents one of the first explorations by the De Stijl art movement in three dimensions. It features several Rietveld joints.
The Zig Zag-chair is a chair designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1934. It is a minimalistic design without legs, made by 4 flat wooden tiles that are merged in a Z-shape using Dovetail joints. It was designed for the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht.
Although oil paint was first used for the canvas became more popular, as it was cheaper, easier to transport, and allowed larger works.
Two aspects of realism were rooted in at least two centuries of Netherlandish tradition: conspicuous textural imitation and a penchant for ordinary and exaggeratedly comic scenes. Two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday - pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed. By the mid-1800s, seventeenth-century Dutch painting figured virtually everywhere in the British and French fiction we esteem today as the vanguard of realism.
Hieronymus Bosch is considered one of the prime examples of pre-surrealism and any artist that produced dream-state or hallucinatory art would fit into the pre-surrealist category. And it was on his example that the surrealists relied most. In the 20th century, Bosch's paintings (e.g. The Garden of Earthly Delights, The Haywain, The Temptation of St. Anthony and The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things) were cited by the Surrealists as precursors to their own visions.
Still-life painting as an independent genre or specialty first flourished in the Netherlands in the last quarter of the 16th century, and the English term derives from stilleven: still life, which is a calque while Romance languages (as well as Greek, Polish, Russian and Turkish) tend to use terms meaning dead nature.
The term "landscape" actually derives from the Dutch word landschap, which originally meant "region, tract of land" but acquired the artistic connotation, "a picture depicting scenery on land" in the early 1500s. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the tradition of depicting pure landscapes declined, and the landscape was seen only as a setting for religious and figural scenes. This tradition continued until the 16th century when artists began to view the landscape as a subject in its own right. The Dutch Golden Age painting of the 17th century saw the dramatic growth of landscape painting, in which many artists specialized, and the development of extremely subtle realist techniques for depicting light and weather.
The Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder made peasants and their activities the subject of many of his paintings, and genre painting was to flourish in Northern Europe in Brueghel's wake. Adriaen van Ostade, David Teniers, Aelbert Cuyp, Jan Steen, Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch were among the many painters specializing in genre subjects in the Netherlands during the 17th century. The generally small scale of these artists' paintings was appropriate for their display in the homes of middle class purchasers.
Marine painting began in keeping with medieval Christian art tradition, and so the original paintings portrayed the sea only from a bird's eye view, and everything, even the waves, were organized and symmetrical. The viewpoint, symmetry, and overall order of these early paintings were to keep in mind the organization of the heavenly cosmos from which the earth was viewed. Later Dutch artists like Ludolf Bakhuizen developed new methods for painting, often from a horizontal point of view, with a lower horizon and more focus on realism than symmetry.
The term vanitas is most often associated with vanitas still life paintings that were popular in seventeenth-century Dutch art by the artists like Pieter Claesz. Common vanitas symbols include skulls, which are a reminder of the certainty of death; rotten fruit, which symbolizes decay; bubbles, which symbolize the brevity of life and suddenness of death; smoke, watches, and hourglasses, which symbolize the brevity of life; and musical instruments, which symbolize brevity and the ephemeral nature of life. Fruit, flowers and butterflies can be interpreted in the same way, and a peeled lemon, as well as accompanying seafood was, like life, attractive to look at, but bitter to taste.
Group portraits were produced in great numbers during the Baroque period, particularly in the Netherlands. Unlike in the rest of Europe, Dutch artists received no commissions from the Calvinist Church which had forbidden such images or from the aristocracy which was virtually non-existent. Instead, commissions came from civic and businesses associations. Dutch painter Frans Hals used fluid brush strokes of vivid color to enliven his group portraits, including those of the civil guards to which he belonged. Rembrandt benefitted greatly from such commissions and from the general appreciation of art by bourgeois clients, who supported portraiture as well as still-life and landscapes painting. In addition, the world's first significant art and dealer markets flourished in Holland at that time.
In the 17th century, Dutch painters (like Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Jan Lievens and Johannes Vermeer) began to create uncommissioned paintings called Tronies that focused on the features and/or expressions of people who were not intended to be identifiable. Tronies were not necessarily defined by their moral or narrative content as were conventional paintings of the period. They were conceived more for art's sake than to satisfy the artistic conventions.
Rembrandt lighting is a lighting technique that is used in studio portrait photography. It can be achieved using one light and a reflector, or two lights, and is popular because it is capable of producing images which appear both natural and compelling with a minimum of equipment. Rembrandt lighting is characterized by an illuminated triangle under the eye of the subject, on the less illuminated side of the face. It is named for the Dutch painter Rembrandt, who often used this type of lighting in his portrait paintings.
Pronkstilleven (pronk still life or ostentatious still life) is a type of banquet piece which has as its distinguishing feature a quality of ostentation and splendor; they usually depict one or more especially precious objects. Although the term is a post-17th century invention, this still life type is characteristic of the second half of the seventeenth century, developed by the still life masters like Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Abraham van Beijeren, Willem Claeszoon Heda and Willem Kalf.
Vincent van Gogh's work is most often associated with Post-Impressionism, but his innovative style had a vast influence on 20th-century art and established what would later be known as Expressionism, also greatly influencing fauvism and early abstractionism.
Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher, usually referred to as M. C. Escher, is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. These feature impossible constructions, explorations of infinity, architecture, and tessellations. The special way of thinking and the rich graphic work of M.C. Escher has had a continuous influence in science and art, as well as being referenced in popular culture. His ideas have been used in psychology, philosophy, logic, crystallography and topology, etc. The art of M.C. Escher is based on mathematical principles like tessellations, spherical geometry, the Möbius strip, unusual perspectives, visual paradoxes, different kinds of symmetries and impossible objects. Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, published in 1979, discusses the ideas of self-reference and strange loops, drawing on a wide range of artistic and scientific work, including the art of M. C. Escher and the music of J. S. Bach, to illustrate ideas behind Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
Miffy (Nijntje) is a small female rabbit in a series of picture books drawn and written by Dutch artist Dick Bruna.
Holsteins or Holstein-Friesians are a breed of cattle known today as the world's highest-production dairy animals. Originating in Europe, Friesians were bred in what is now the Netherlands and more specifically in the two northern provinces of North Holland and Friesland, and northern Germany, more specifically what is now Schleswig-Holstein. The animals were the regional cattle of the Frisians and the Saxons. The Dutch breeders bred and oversaw the development of the breed with the goal of obtaining animals that could best use grass, the area's most abundant resource. Over the centuries, the result was a high-producing, black-and-white dairy cow. It is black and white due to artificial selection by the breeders. Holsteins are mostly black and white but sometimes are red and white. Although called red, the "red" resembles the brown of a chestnut horse. They get this coloration from their ancestors, a now extinct breed that lived with two nomadic tribes of Northern Europe, the Batavians and the Frisians. Crossbreeding may have led to the foundation of the present Holstein-Friesian breed, as the cattle of these two tribes from then are described identically in historical records.
Orange-coloured carrots appeared in the Netherlands in the 16th century. Dutch carrot growers invented the orange carrot by cross breeding pale yellow carrots with red carrots. Before that carrots were white, yellow, black, purple or red. Orange carrots are said to have been bred in honour of the House of Orange, who led the Dutch Revolt against Spain and later became the Dutch Royal family.
Tinbergen's four questions, named after Nikolaas Tinbergen (one of the founders of modern ethology), are complementary categories of explanations for behavior. It suggests that an integrative understanding of behavior must include both a proximate and ultimate (functional) analysis of behavior, as well as an understanding of both phylogenetic/developmental history and the operation of current mechanisms.
The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It became the standard map projection for nautical purposes because of its ability to represent lines of constant course, known as rhumb lines or loxodromes, as straight segments which conserve the angles with the meridians.
Flemish geographer and cartographer Abraham Ortelius generally recognized as the creator of the world's first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World). The Ortelius atlas consisted of a collection of uniform map sheets and sustaining text bound to form a book for which copper printing plates were specifically engraved. It is sometimes referred to as the summary of sixteenth-century cartography.
The speculation that continents might have 'drifted' was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596. The concept was independently and more fully developed by Alfred Wegener in 1912. Because Wegener's publications were widely available in German and English, and because he adduced geological support for the idea, Wegener is credited by most geologists as the first to recognize the possibility of continental drift. During the 1960s geophysical and geological evidence for seafloor spreading at mid-oceanic ridges became increasingly compelling to geologists and finally established continental drift as an ongoing global mechanism. After more than three centuries, Ortelius's supposition of continental drift was proven correct.
While making a coloured liquid for a thermometer, Cornelis Drebbel dropped a flask of Aqua regia on a tin window sill, and discovered that stannous chloride makes the color of carmine much brighter and more durable. Though Drebbel himself never made much money from his work, his daughters Anna and Catharina and his sons-in-law Abraham and Johannes Sibertus Kuffler set up a successful dye works. One was set up in 1643 in Bow, London, and the resulting color was called bow dye.
Dutch chemical company DSM invented and patented the Dyneema in 1979. Dyneema fibres have been in commercial production since 1990 at their plant at Heerlen, the Netherlands. These fibers are manufactured by means of a gel-spinning process that combines extreme strength with incredible softness. Dyneema fibres, based on ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE), is used in many applications in various end-markets, such as life protection, shipping, fishing, offshore, sailing, medical and textiles.
In 1962 Philips invented the compact audio cassette medium for audio storage, introducing it in Europe in August 1963 (at the Berlin Radio Show) and in the United States (under the Norelco brand) in November 1964, with the trademark name Compact Cassette.
Laserdisc technology, using a transparent disc,[1] was invented by David Paul Gregg in 1958 (and patented in 1961 and 1990).[2][3] By 1969, Philips had developed a videodisc in reflective mode, which has great advantages over the transparent mode. MCA and Philips decided to join their efforts. They first publicly demonstrated the videodisc in 1972. Laserdisc was first available on the market, in Atlanta, on December 15, 1978, two years after the VHS VCR and four years before the CD, which is based on Laserdisc technology. Philips produced the players and MCA the discs.
The compact disc was jointly developed by Philips (The Netherlands on March 8, 1979.
wireless connection.
In 1991, NCR Corporation/AT&T Corporation invented the precursor to 802.11 in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands. Dutch electrical engineer Vic Hayes, who held the chair of IEEE 802.11 committee for 10 years, which was set up in 1990 to establish a wireless networking standard. He has been called the father of Wi-Fi (the brand name for products using IEEE 802.11 standards) because he managed the committee that created the first IEEE 802.11 (802.11a & 802.11b) standard in 1997.
The Sony in 1995.
In 1982, Philips teamed with Sony to launch the Compact Disc; this format evolved into the DVD and later Blu-ray, which Philips launched with Sony in 1997 and 2006 respectively.
Dijkstra's algorithm, conceived by Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra in 1956 and published in 1959, is a graph search algorithm that solves the single-source shortest path problem for a graph with non-negative edge path costs, producing a shortest path tree. This algorithm is often used in routing and as a subroutine in other graph algorithms.
The semaphore concept was invented by Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra in 1965, and the concept has found widespread use in a variety of operating systems.
Dekker's algorithm is the first known correct solution to the mutual exclusion problem in concurrent programming. The solution is attributed to Dutch mathematician Theodorus Dekker by Edsger Dijkstra in his manuscript on cooperating sequential processes. It allows two threads to share a single-use resource without conflict, using only shared memory for communication. Dekker's algorithm is the first published software-only, two-process mutual exclusion algotithm.
Van Wijngaarden grammar (also vW-grammar or W-grammar) is a two-level grammar which provides a technique to define potentially infinite context-free grammars in a finite number of rules. The formalism was invented by Adriaan van Wijngaarden to define rigorously some syntactic restrictions which previously had to be formulated in natural language, despite their essentially syntactical content. Typical applications are the treatment of gender and number in natural language syntax and the well-definedness of identifiers in programming languages. The technique was used and developed in the definition of the programming language ALGOL 68. It is an example of the larger class of affix grammars.
In 1968, computer programming was in a state of crisis. Edsger Dijkstra was one of a small group of academics and industrial programmers who advocated a new programming style to improve the quality of programs. Dijkstra coined the phrase "structured programming" and during the 1970s this became the new programming orthodoxy.
EFM (Eight-to-Fourteen Modulation) was invented by Dutch electrical engineer Kees A. Schouhamer Immink in 1985. Eight-to-fourteen modulation (EFM) is a data encoding technique – formally, a channel code – used by compact discs (CD), laserdiscs (LD) and pre-Hi-MD MiniDiscs.
Python programming language was conceived in the late 1980s and its implementation was started in December 1989 by Guido van Rossum.
Vim is a text editor written by the Dutch free software programmer Bram Moolenaar and first released publicly in 1991. Based on the Vi editor common to Unix-like systems, Vim is designed for use both from a command line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface.
EFMPlus is the channel code used in DVDs and SACDs, a more efficient successor of EFM used in CD. EFMPlus, created by Dutch electrical engineer Kees A. Schouhamer Immink, who also designed EFM, is 6% less efficient than Toshiba's SD code, which resulted in a capacity of 4.7 Gbyte instead of SD's original 5 Gbyte. The great advantage of EFMPlus is its great resilience against disc damage such as scratches and fingerprints.
The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was the first corporation to issue shares of stock and bonds.
The Dutch East India Company is often considered to have been the first multinational corporation in the world.
The Dutch East India Company was arguably the first megacorporation, possessing quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, imprison and execute convicts, negotiate treaties, coin money, and establish colonies.
Dutch auction also known as an open descending price auction. Named after the famous auctions of Dutch tulip bulbs in the 17th century, it is based on a pricing system devised by Nobel prize winning economist William Vickrey. In the traditional Dutch auction, the auctioneer begins with a high asking price which is lowered until some participant is willing to accept the auctioneer's price. The winning participant pays the last announced price. Dutch auction is also sometimes used to describe online auctions where several identical goods are sold simultaneously to an equal number of high bidders. In addition to cut flower sales in the Netherlands, Dutch auctions have also been used for perishable commodities such as fish and tobacco.
Economic historians consider the Netherlands as the first thoroughly capitalist country. In Early modern Europe it featured the wealthiest trading city (Amsterdam) and the first full-time stock exchange. The inventiveness of the traders led to insurance and retirement funds, along with much less benign phenomena as well, such as the boom-bust cycle, the world's first asset-inflation bubble, the Tulip mania of 1636–1637.
Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen developed the first national comprehensive macroeconomic model, which he first built for the Netherlands and later applied to the United States and the United Kingdom after World War II.
The concept of fair trade has been around for over 40 years, but a formal labelling scheme didn't get off the ground until the 1980s. At the initiative of Mexican coffee farmers, the world's first Fairtrade labelling organisation, Stichting Max Havelaar, was launched in the Netherlands on November 15, 1988 by Nico Roozen, Frans van der Hoff and Dutch ecumenical development agency Solidaridad. It was branded "Max Havelaar" after a fictional Dutch character who opposed the exploitation of coffee pickers in Dutch colonies.
The Amsterdam Stock Exchange is considered the oldest in the world. It was established in 1602 by the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or "VOC") for dealings in its printed stocks and bonds. Here, the Dutch also pioneered stock futures, stock options, short selling, debt-equity swaps, merchant banking, bonds, unit trusts and other speculative instruments. Also, a speculative bubble that crashed in 1695, and a change in fashion that unfolded and reverted in time with the market.
In 1602, Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), otherwise known as the Dutch East India Company, became the first modern company to issue shares to the public, thus launching the first initial public offering (IPO). The VOC held the first public offering of shares in history shortly after its founding, for much the same reason that companies offer their shares in IPOs today.
The Bank of Amsterdam (Amsterdamsche Wisselbank) was an early bank, vouched for by the city of Amsterdam, established in 1609, the forerunner to, if not the first true central bank.
Financial innovation in Amsterdam took many forms. In 1609, investors led by one Isaac Le Maire formed history's first bear syndicate, but their coordinated trading had only a modest impact in driving down share prices, which tended to be robust throughout the 17th century.
In 1656, King Charles X Gustav of Sweden signed two charters creating two private banks under the directorship of Johan Palmstruch (though before having been ennobled he was called Johan Wittmacher or Hans Wittmacher), a Riga-born merchant of Dutch origin. Palmstruch modeled the banks on those of Amsterdam where he had become a burgher. The first real European banknote was issued in 1661 by the Stockholms Banco of Johan Palmstruch, a private bank under state charter (precursor to the Sveriges Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden).
stock trading, taking the form of a dialogue between a merchant, a shareholder and a philosopher, the book described a market that was sophisticated but also prone to excesses, and de la Vega offered advice to his readers on such topics as the unpredictability of market shifts and the importance of patience in investment.
In the Early Modern period (the seventeenth century in particular), Amsterdam, despite its small size and population, was the first ever global financial centre. Amsterdam - unlike its predecessors Bruges, Antwerp, Genoa, and Venice - was able to control crucial resources and markets directly, sending its fleets to all quarters of the world.
In early 1600s, the Dutch revolutionized domestic and international finance by inventing the common stock — that of the Dutch East India Company and founding a proto-central bank, the Wisselbank or Bank of Amsterdam. In 1609, the Dutch had already had a government bond market for some decades. Shortly thereafter, the Dutch Republic had in place, in one form or another, all of the key components of a modern financial system: a strong public credit, a stable money, elements of a banking system, a central bank of sorts, and securities markets. The Dutch Republic went on to become the leading economy of the seventeenth century.
Many people believe it was the Dutch who invented doughnuts. A Dutch snack made from potatoes had a round shape like a ball, but, like Gregory's dough balls, needed a little longer time when fried to cook the inside thoroughly. These potato-balls developed into doughnuts when the Dutch finally made them into ring-shapes to help them fry in less amount of time. Finally, in 1620 the Pilgrims, who had lived in Holland, came to New World (North America) and brought the doughnut.
Believed to have been invented by a Dutch chemist and alchemist named Franciscus Sylvius, jenever (a.k.a genever or Dutch gin) was first sold as a medicine.
A stroopwafel (also known as syrup waffle, treacle waffle or caramel waffle) is a waffle made from two thin layers of baked batter with a caramel-like syrup filling in the middle. They were first made in Gouda in the Netherlands, in 1780s. The traditional way to eat the stroopwafel is to place it atop of a drinking vessel with a hot beverage (coffee, tea or chocolate) inside that fits the diameter of the waffle. The heat from the rising steam warms the waffle and slightly softens the inside and makes the waffle soft on one side while still crispy on the other.
In 1820s, Casparus van Houten Sr. patented an inexpensive method for pressing the fat from roasted cocoa beans. The center of the bean, known as the "nib," contains an average of 54 percent cocoa butter, which is a natural fat. Van Houten's machine - a hydraulic press - reduced the cocoa butter content by nearly half. This created a "cake" that could be pulverized into cocoa powder, which was to become the basis of all chocolate products.
Dutch process chocolate or Dutched chocolate is chocolate that has been treated with an alkalizing agent to modify its color and give it a milder taste compared to "natural cocoa" extracted with the Broma process. It forms the basis for much of modern chocolate, and is used in ice cream, hot cocoa, and baking. The Dutch process was developed in the early 19th century by Dutch chocolate maker Coenraad Johannes van Houten, whose father Casparus is responsible for the development of the method of removing fat from cacao beans by hydraulic press around 1828, forming the basis for cocoa powder.
In 1609, Hugo Grotius, famous Dutch jurist who is generally known as the father of modern international law, published his book Mare Liberum (The Free Sea), which first formulated the notion of the freedom of the seas. He developed this idea into a legal principle. According to his view, everyone had a right under international law to sail freely and trade with others. His work sparked a debate in the seventeenth century as to the freedom of the seas, and whether states could exclude the vessels of other states from certain waters. However, Grotius was the winner of this debate, as freedom of the seas finally became a universally recognized legal principle, as it went hand in hand with key words such as communication, trade and peace, and was inseparable from being fair and open, and was in the interests of human society as a whole.
The publication of De jure belli ac pacis (English: On the Law of War and Peace) by Hugo Grotius in 1625 had marked the emergence of international law as an 'autonomous legal science'. Grotius' truly distinctive contribution to international law (law of nations) was that he 'secularized' it.
By the end of the seventeenth century, support was growing elsewhere for some limitation to the seaward extent of territorial sea.
In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legally recognize (legalize) same-sex marriage.
A pendulum clock uses a pendulum as its time base. From their invention until about 1930, the most accurate clocks were pendulum clocks. Pendulum clocks cannot operate on vehicles, because the accelerations of the vehicle drive the pendulum, causing inaccuracies. See marine chronometer for a discussion of the problems of navigational clocks. The pendulum clock was invented by Christian Huygens in 1656, based on the pendulum introduced by Galileo Galilei.
Pendulum clocks remained the mechanism of choice for accurate timekeeping for centuries, with the time standards considered. Pendulum clocks remain popular for domestic, decorative and antique use.
There remains some dispute as to whether British scientist Robert Hooke was the actual inventor of the balance spring (his was a straight spring) or whether it was Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens. The fact of the matter remains that it was Huygens who first successfully implemented a spiral balance spring in a portable timekeeper. This is significant because up to that point it had been the pendulum that was most reliable in keeping and portioning time, which cannot be integrated into a portable timepiece.
In 1714, German-Dutch scientist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit invented the mercury thermometer in Amsterdam.
Fahrenheit (symbol °F) is a temperature scale based on one proposed in 1724 by the Polish-born Dutch scientist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, after whom the scale is named. Farenheit had settled in Amsterdam in 1701 before travelling around Europe, meeting instrument makers and scientists. It was during this period he invented the mercury thermometer (1714). He returned to Amsterdam in 1717. He published his method for thermometer construction in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1724. The Fahrenheit scale was the first widely used temperature scale. By the end of the 20th century, most countries used the Celsius scale rather than the Fahrenheit scale, though Canada retains it as a supplementary scale that can be used alongside Celsius. Fahrenheit remains the official scale for the following countries: Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, Belize, the Bahamas, Palau, and the United States and associated territories.
Snellen chart is an eye chart used by eye care professionals and others to measure visual acuity. Snellen charts are named after the Dutch ophthalmologist Hermann Snellen who developed the chart in 1862. Vision scientists now use a variation of this chart, designed by Ian Bailey and Jan Lovie.
Previous to the string galvanometer, scientists were using a machine called the capillary electrometer to measure the heart's electrical activity, but this device was unable to produce results of a diagnostic level. Dutch physiologist Willem Einthoven developed the string galvanometer in the early 20th century, publishing the first registration of its use to record an electrocardiogram in a Festschrift book in 1902. The first human electrocardiogram was recorded in 1887, however it was not until 1901 that a quantifiable result was obtained from the string galvanometer.
In 1922, Dutch astronomer Jan Schilt invented the Schilt photometer, a device which measures the light output of stars, and, indirectly, their distances.
In the 19th century it became clear that the heart generated electricity. The first to systematically approach the heart from an electrical point-of-view was Augustus Waller, working in St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London. In 1911 he still saw little clinical application for his work. The breakthrough came when Willem Einthoven, working in Leiden, The Netherlands, used the string galvanometer invented by him in 1901, which was much more sensitive than the capillary electrometer that Waller used. Einthoven assigned the letters P, Q, R, S and T to the various deflections, and described the electrocardiographic features of a number of cardiovascular disorders. He was awarded the 1924 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery.
When German bombers attacked The Hague in 1940 while Willem Johan Kolff was there, he organised the first blood bank in continental Europe.
An artificial kidney is the machine and its related devices which allow to clean the blood of patients who have a temporary (acute) or an ongoing (chronic) failure of their kidneys. The first artificial kidney was developed by Willem Johan Kolff. The procedure of cleaning the blood by this means is called dialysis, a type of renal replacement therapy which is used to provide an artificial replacement for lost kidney function due to renal failure. It is a life support treatment and does not treat any kidney diseases.
On December 12, 1957, Dr. Willem Johan Kolff implanted an artificial heart into a dog at Cleveland Clinic. The dog lived for 90 minutes. In 1967, Dr. Kolff left Cleveland Clinic to start the Division of Artificial Organs at the University of Utah and pursue his work on the artificial heart. Under his supervision, a team of surgeons, chemists, physicists and bioengineers developed an artificial heart and made it ready for industrial serial production. To help manage his many endeavors, Dr. Kolff assigned project managers. Each project was named after its manager. Graduate student Robert Jarvik was the project manager for the artificial heart, which was subsequently renamed the Jarvik-7. Based on lengthy animal trials, this first total artificial heart was then successfully implanted into the thorax of Dr Barney Clark in December 1982. Patient Barney Clark survived 112 days with the device, dying on March 23, 1983.
The early modern military revolution began with the military reforms inaugurated by Prince Maurice of Nassau with his cousins Count Willem Lodewijk of Nassau-Dillenburg and Count John VII of Nassau during the 1590s. Maurice developed a system of linear formations (linear tactics), discipline, drill, and volley fire based on classical Roman methods which made his army more efficient and his command and control more effective. He also developed a 43-step drill for firing the musket which was written into an illustrated weapons manual by Jacob de Gheyn II in 1607 (Wapenhandelinghe or Exerise of Arms). This became known as the Dutch drill. It was widely read and emulated in the rest of Europe. Adopting and perfecting the techniques pioneered by Maurice of Nassau several decades earlier, Gustavus Adolphus repeatedly proved his techniques by defeating the armies of Spain (1630-1632), an empire with resources fantastically larger than Sweden's.
The Norden bombsight was designed by Carl Norden, a Dutch engineer educated in Switzerland who emigrated to the U.S. in 1904. In 1920, he started work on the Norden bombsight for the United States Navy. The first bombsight was produced in 1927. It was essentially an analog computer, and bombardiers were trained in great secrecy on how to use it. The device was used to drop bombs accurately from an aircraft, supposedly accurate enough to hit a 100 foot circle from an altitude of 21,000 feet—but under actual combat situations, such an accuracy was never achieved.
A submarine snorkel is a device that allows a submarine to operate submerged while still taking in air from above the surface. It was invented by the Dutchman J.J.Wichers shortly before World War II and copied by the Germans during the war for use by U-Boats. Its common military name is snort.
Goalkeeper is a close-in weapon system (CIWS) and still in use as of 2013. It is an autonomous and completely automatic weapon system for short-range defense of ships against highly maneuverable missiles, aircraft and fast maneuvering surface vessels. Once activated the system automatically performs the entire process from surveillance and detection to destruction, including selection of the next priority target.
The first metronome was invented by Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel in Amsterdam in 1812 but named (patented) after Johann Maelzel, who took the idea and popularized it.
Dutch musician-physicist Adriaan Fokker designed and had built a number of keyboard instruments capable of playing microtonal scales via a generalized keyboard. The best-known of these is his 31-tone equal-tempered organ, which was installed in Teylers Museum in Haarlem in 1951. It is commonly called the Fokker organ.
The Kraakdoos or Cracklebox is a custom made battery-powered noise-making The Netherlands.
The Moodswinger is a twelve-string electric zither with an additional third bridge designed by Dutch luthier Yuri Landman. The rod which functions as the third bridge divides the strings into two sections to cause an overtone multiphonic sound.
The Springtime is an experimental electric guitar with seven strings and three outputs. The instrument was created in 2008 by Dutch experimental luthier Yuri Landman.
Neostoicism was a Catholic Spain.
"European liberalism," Isaiah Berlin wrote, "wears the appearance of a single coherent movement, little altered during almost three centuries, founded upon relatively simple foundations, laid by Locke or Grotius or even Spinoza; stretching back to Erasmus and Montaigne..."
As Bertrand Russell noted in his A History of Western Philosophy (1945): "Descartes lived in Holland for twenty years (1629-49), except for a few brief visits to France and one to England, all on business. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Holland in the seventeenth century, as the one country where there was freedom of speculation. Hobbes had to have his books printed there; Locke took refuge there during the five worst years of reaction in England before 1688; Bayle (of the Dictionary) found it necessary to live there; and Spinoza would hardly have been allowed to do his work in any other country." Russell described early liberalism in Europe: "Early liberalism was a product of England and Holland, and had certain well-marked characteristics. It stood for religious toleration; it was Protestant, but of a latitudinarian rather than of a fanatical kind; it regarded the wars of religion as silly..."
Cartesianism is the name given to the philosophical doctrine of René Descartes. Descartes is often regarded as the first thinker to emphasize the use of reason to develop the natural sciences. Cartesians view the mind as being wholly separate from the corporeal body. Sensation and the perception of reality are thought to be the source of untruth and illusions, with the only reliable truths to be had in the existence of a metaphysical mind. Such a mind can perhaps interact with a physical body, but it does not exist in the body, nor even in the same physical plane as the body. Cartesianism had been controversial for several years before 1656. René Descartes himself had lived in the Dutch Republic for some twenty years (1628-1649). His Discours de la méthode (1637) was originally published at Leiden, and his Principia philosophiae (1644) appeared from the presses at Amsterdam. In the 1630s and 1640s, Descartes's ideas gained a foothold at the Dutch universities.
Spinozism is the monist philosophical system of the Dutch-Jew philosopher Baruch Spinoza which defines "God" as a singular self-subsistent substance, with both matter and thought being attributes of such.
Affect (affectus or adfectus in social sciences.
Mathematical intuitionism was founded by the Dutch mathematician and philosopher Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer. In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism (opposed to preintuitionism), is an approach where mathematics is considered to be purely the result of the constructive mental activity of humans rather than the discovery of fundamental principles claimed to exist in an objective reality. That is, logic and mathematics are not considered analytic activities wherein deep properties of objective reality are revealed and applied but are instead considered the application of internally consistent methods used to realize more complex mental constructs, regardless of their possible independent existence in an objective reality.
In 1590 the Dutchmen Hans and Zacharias Janssen (Father and son) invented the first compound microscope. It would have a single glass lens of short focal length for the objective, and another single glass lens for the eyepiece or ocular. A resident of Delft, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, effectively launched high-power microscopy using single-lens, simple microscopes. With these modest instruments he discovered the world of micro-organisms. Modern microscopes are far more complex, with multiple lens components in both objective and eyepiece assemblies. These multi-component lenses are designed to reduce aberrations, particularly chromatic aberration and spherical aberration. In modern microscopes the mirror is replaced by a lamp unit providing stable, controllable illumination.
Hans Lippershey created and disseminated the first practical telescope. Crude telescopes and spyglasses may have been created much earlier, but Lippershey is believed to be the first to apply for a patent for his design (beating out Jacob Metius by a few weeks) and make it available for general use in 1608. He failed to receive a patent but was handsomely rewarded by the Dutch government for copies of his design. A description of Lippershey's instrument quickly reached Galileo Galilei, who created a working design in 1609, with which he made the observations found in his Sidereus Nuncius of 1610.
There is a legend that Lippershey's children actually discovered the telescope while playing with flawed lenses in their father's workshop, but this may be apocryphal.
Lippershey crater, on the Moon, is named after him.[4]
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek created at least 25 microscopes, of differing types, of which only nine survive. His simple microscopes were made of silver or copper frames, holding hand-ground lenses. Those that have survived are capable of magnification up to 275 times. It is suspected that Van Leeuwenhoek possessed some microscopes that could magnify up to 500 times. Using his handcrafted microscopes, he was the first to observe and describe single-celled organisms, which he originally referred to as animalcules, and which now referred to as micro-organisms or microbes.
The pyrometer, invented by Pieter van Musschenbroek, is a temperature measuring device, which may consist of several different arrangements. A simple type of pyrometer uses a thermocouple placed either in the furnace or on the item to be measured. The voltage output of the thermocouple is read from a digital or analog meter calibrated in degrees Celsius (C) or Fahrenheit (F). There are many different types of thermocouple available, and these can be used to measure temperatures from -200 °C to above 1500 °C.[5]
The Leyden jar was the original capacitor, developed by Pieter van Musschenbroek in the 18th century and used to conduct many early experiments in electricity.
The device was a glass jar coated inside and out with metal. The inner coating was connected to a rod that passed through the lid and ended in a metal ball. Typical designs consist of an electrode and a plate, each of which stores an opposite charge. These two elements are conductive and are separated by an insulator (e.g., the glass dielectric). The charge is stored at the surface of the elements, at the boundary with the dielectric.
The Eisinga Planetarium (Royal Eise Eisinga Planetarium) was built by Eise Eisinga in his home in Franeker, Friesland, Netherlands. It took Eisinga seven years to build his planetarium, which was completed in 1781. The orrery still exists and is the oldest still working planetarium in the world.
Kipp's apparatus, also called Kipp generator, is an apparatus designed for preparation of small volumes of gases. It was invented around 1860 by the Dutch pharmacist Petrus Jacobus Kipp and widely used in chemical laboratories and for demonstrations in schools into the second half of the 20th century.
In optical microscopy many objects such as cell parts in protozoans, bacteria and sperm tails are essentially fully transparent unless stained (and therefore killed). The difference in densities and composition within these objects however often give rise to changes in the phase of light passing through them, hence they are sometimes called "phase objects". Using the phase-contrast technique makes these structures visible and allows their study with the specimen still alive. This phase contrast technique proved to be such an advancement in microscopy that Dutch physicist Frits Zernike was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1953.
The magnetic horn (also known as the Van der Meer horn) is a high-current, pulsed focusing device, invented by the Dutch physicist Simon van der Meer in CERN, selected pions and focused them into a sharp beam. The original application of the magnetic horn was in the context of neutrino physics, where beams of pions have to be tightly focused. When the pions then decay into muons and neutrinos or antineutrinos, an equally well-focused neutrino beam is obtained. The muons were stopped in a wall of 3000 tons of iron and 1000 tons of concrete, leaving the neutrinos or antineutrinos to reach the Gargamelle bubble chamber.
A golf-like game (kolf in Dutch) is recorded as taking place on 26 February 1297, in the Netherlands, in a city called Loenen aan de Vecht, where the Dutch played a game with a stick and leather ball. The winner was whoever hit the ball with the least number of strokes into a target several hundred yards away. Some scholars argue that this game of putting a small ball in a hole in the ground using golf clubs was also played in 17th-century Netherlands and that this predates the game in Scotland.
Ice speed skating, which had developed in the Netherlands in the 17th century, was given a boost by the innovations in skate construction. Speed skating, or speedskating, is a competitive form of ice skating in which the competitors race each other in traveling a certain distance on skates. Types of speed skating are long track speed skating, short track speed skating, and marathon speed skating. In the Olympic Games, long-track speed skating is usually referred to as just "speed skating", while short-track speed skating is known as "short track".
Sailing, also known as yachting, is a sport in which competitors race from point to point, or around a race course, in sail-powered vessels. Yachting refers to recreational sailing or boating, the specific act of sailing or using other water vessels for sporting purposes. The invention of sailing is prehistoric, but the racing of sailing boats (yachting) is believed to have started in the Netherlands some time in the 17th century.
Korfball (Korfbal in Nico Broekhuysen.
The Cruijff Turn (also known as Cruyff Turn), one of the most famous dribbling tricks in the soccer today, was perfected by the Dutch football player Johan Cruijff who was immortalised in having this trick of evasion named after him. To make this move, the person would look to pass or cross the ball, however, instead of kicking it, he would drag the ball behind his planted foot with the inside of his other foot, turn through 180 degrees and accelerate away outside a bemused defender. The trick was famously employed by Cruijff in the 1974 FIFA World Cup, first being seen in the Netherlands' match against Sweden, and was soon widely copied by other players around the world.
The foundations for Total Football were laid by Englishman Jack Reynolds who was the manager of AFC Ajax from 1915-1925, 1928-1940, and 1945-1947. Rinus Michels, who played under Reynolds, later went on to become manager of Ajax himself and refined the concept into what is known today as "Total Football" (Totaalvoetbal in Dutch language), using it in his training for the Ajax Amsterdam squad and the Netherlands national football team in the 1970s. It was further refined by Stefan Kovacs after Michels left for FC Barcelona. Dutch playmaker Johan Cruyff was the system's most famous exponent. Due to Cruyff's style of play, he is still referred to as the total footballer.
FC Barcelona and the Spanish national football team play a style of football known as Tiki-taka that has its roots in Total Football. Tiki-taka (commonly spelled tiqui-taca in Spanish language) was founded by Johan Cruyff during his time as manager of FC Barcelona (1988-1996) and was successfully adopted by the all-conquering Spanish national team (2008-2012). Tiki-taka style differs from Total Football in that it focuses on ball movement rather than the positional interchange that was a cornerstone of the original Total Football philosophy.
The Netherlands takes great importance in the history of canal construction in that it revived the construction of canals during the 13th-14th century that had generally been discontinued since the fall of the Roman Empire. They also have contributed greatly in the development of canal construction technology, such as introducing the first flash locks in Europe. The first pound lock in Europe was built by the Dutch in 1373 at Vreeswijk, where a canal from Utrecht joins the river Lek.
Around 1620s, Cornelis Drebbel developed an automatic temperature control system for a furnace, motivated by his belief that base metals could be turned to gold by holding them at a precise constant temperature for long periods of time. He also used this temperature regulator in an incubator for hatching chickens.
Feedback control has been used for centuries to regulate engineered systems. In the 17th century, Cornelius Drebbel invented one of the earliest devices to use feedback, an chicken incubator that used a damper controlled by a thermometer to maintain a constant temperature.
The magic lantern is an optical device, early type of image projector developed in the 17th century.The history of the magic lantern starts around 1420 when something that looked like a magic lantern first appeared in a drawing. There has been some debate about who the original inventor of the magic lantern is, but the most widely accepted theory is that Christiaan Huygens developed the original device in the late 1650s.
In Holland, the Superintendent of the Fire Brigade, Jan van der Heyden, and his son Nicholaas took firefighting to its next step with the fashioning of the first Fire hose in 1673.
Christiaan Huygens designs gunpowder to drive water pumps, to supply 3000 cubic meters of water/day for the Versailles palace gardens, essentially creating the first idea of a rudimentary internal combustion piston engine.
Hollander beater is a machine developed by the Dutch in 1680 to produce paper pulp from cellulose containing plant fibers. It replaced stamp mills for preparing pulp because the Hollander could produce in one day the same quantity of pulp it would take a stamp mill eight days to prepare.
A pentode is an electronic device having five active electrodes. The term most commonly applies to a three-grid vacuum tube (thermionic valve), which was invented by the Dutchman Bernhard D.H. Tellegen in 1926.
Philishave was the brand name for the electric shavers manufactured by the Philips Domestic Appliances and Personal Care unit of Philips (in the U.S.A., the Norelco name is used instead). The Philishave shaver was invented by Philips engineer Alexandre Horowitz, who used rotating cutters instead of the reciprocating cutters that had been used in previous electric shavers.
A gyrator is a passive, linear, lossless, two-port electrical network element invented in 1948 by Dutchman Bernard D. H. Tellegen as a hypothetical fifth linear element after the resistor, capacitor, inductor and ideal transformer.
Dutch company Gatsometer BV, founded by the 1950s rally driver Maurice Gatsonides, invented the first traffic enforcement camera. Gatsonides wished to better monitor his speed around the corners of a race track and came up with the device in order to improve his time around the circuit [2]. The company developed the first radar for use with road traffic, and is the world's largest supplier of speed camera systems. Because of this, in some countries speed cameras are sometimes referred to as "Gatsos". They are also sometimes referred to as "photo radar", even though many of them do not use radar.
The first systems introduced in the late 1960s used film cameras to take their pictures. From the late 1990s, digital cameras began to be introduced. Digital cameras can be fitted with a modem or other electronic interface to transfer images to a central processing location automatically, so they have advantages over film cameras in speed of issuing fines, and operational monitoring. However, film-based systems still generally provide superior image quality in the variety of lighting conditions encountered on roads, and in some jurisdictions are required by the courts due to the ease with which digital images may be modified. New film-based systems are still being sold.
Variomatic is the stepless, fully automatic transmission of the Dutch car manufacturer DAF, originally developed by Hub van Doorne. The Variomatic was introduced by DAF in 1958 (DAF 600), also putting an automatic gear box in the Netherlands for the first time. It is also used in today's motorscooters. Variomatic was the first commercially successful continuously variable transmission (CVT).
Red light camera is a traffic enforcement camera that captures an image of a vehicle which has entered an intersection against a red traffic light. By automatically photographing vehicles that run red lights, the camera produces evidence that assists authorities in their enforcement of traffic laws. Red light cameras were first developed in the Netherlands. The first red light camera system was introduced in 1965, using tubes stretched across the road to detect the violation and subsequently trigger the camera. One of the first developers of these red light camera systems was Dutch company Gatsometer BV. These cameras are used worldwide, in countries including Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Singapore and the United States.
Stochastic cooling is a form of particle beam cooling. It is used in some particle accelerators and storage rings to control the emittance of the particle beams in the machine. This process uses the electrical signals that the individual charged particles generate in a feedback loop to reduce the tendency of individual particles to move away from the other particles in the beam. This technique was invented and applied at the Intersecting Storage Rings, and later the Super Proton Synchrotron, at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland by the Dutch physicist Simon van der Meer. By increasing the particle density to close to the required energy, this technique improved the beam quality and, inter alia, brought the discovery of the W and Z bosons within reach.
The clap skate (also called clapskates, slap skates, slapskates) is a type of ice skate used in speed skating. Clap skates were developed at the Faculty of Human Movement Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, led by Gerrit Jan van Ingen Schenau, although the idea of a clap skate is much older. Gerrit Jan van Ingen Schenau, who started work on a hinged speed skate in 1979, created his first prototype in 1980 and finished his PhD thesis on the subject in 1981 on the premise that a skater would benefit from the extended movement with the skate on the ice, allowing the calf muscles to longer partake in the skate movement.
In the 14th century, the Dutch started using wooden platform skates with flat iron bottom runners. The skates were attached to the skater's shoes with leather straps and poles were used to propel the skater. Around 1500, the Dutch shifted to a narrow metal double edged blade, so the skater could now push and glide with his feet eliminating the need for a pole.
Originally defined as a light, fast sailing vessel used by the Dutch navy to pursue pirates and other transgressors around and into the shallow waters of the Low Countries. Later, yachts came to be perceived as luxury, or recreational vessels.
Fluyt, a type of sailing vessel originally designed as a dedicated cargo vessel. Originating from the Netherlands in the 16th century, the vessel was designed to facilitate transoceanic delivery with the maximum of space and crew efficiency. The inexpensive ship, which could be built in large numbers. This ship class was credited in enhancing Dutch competitiveness in international trade, and was widely employed by the Dutch East India Company in the 17th and 18th centuries. The fluyt was a significant factor in the 17th century rise of the Dutch seaborne empire.
Cornelis Corneliszoon (Born 1550 in Uitgeest - died 1600) was the inventor of the wind powered sawmill. Prior to the invention of sawmills, boards were rived and planed, or more often sawn by two men with a whipsaw using saddleblocks to hold the log and a pit for the pitman who worked below and got the benefit of the sawdust in his eyes. Sawing was slow and required strong and enduring men. The topsawer had to be the stronger of the two because the saw was pulled in turn by each man, and the lower had the advantage of gravity. The topsawyer also had to guide the saw so the board was of even thickness. This was often done by following a chalkline.
Early sawmills simply adapted the whipsaw to mechanical power, generally driven by a water wheel to speed up the process. The circular motion of the wheel was changed to back-and-forth motion of the saw blade by a pitman thus introducing a term used in many mechanical applications. A pitman is similar to a crankshaft but used in reverse. A crankshaft converts back-and-forth motion to circular motion.
Generally only the saw was powered and the logs had to be loaded and moved by hand. An early improvement was the development of a movable carriage, also water powered, to steadily move the log through the saw blade.
Wind chariot or land yacht (Zeilwagen) designed by Dutch-Flemish mathematician & engineer Simon Stevin for Prince Maurice of Orange. Land yacht, a carriage with sails, of which a little model had been preserved in Scheveningen until 2012. The carriage itself had been lost long before. Around the year 1600, Simon Stevin with Prince Maurice of Orange and twenty-six others, made use of it on the beach between Scheveningen and Petten. The carriage was propelled solely by the force of wind, and acquired a speed which exceeded that of horses.
Cornelius Drebbel, was the inventor of the first navigable submarine, while working for the Royal Navy. Using William Bourne's design from 1578, he manufactured a steerable submarine with a leather-covered wooden frame. Between 1620 and 1624 Drebbel successfully built and tested two more submarines, each one bigger than the last. The final (third) model had 6 oars and could carry 16 passengers. This model was demonstrated to King James I in person and several thousand Londoners. The submarine stayed submerged for three hours and could travel from Westminster to Greenwich and back, cruising at a depth of from 12 to 15 feet (4 to 5 metres). This submarine was tested many times in the Thames, but never used in combat.
In 1903, the Dutch car manufacturer Spyker introduces the first four-wheel drive car, as well as hill-climb racer, with internal combustion engine, the Spyker 60 H.P..
Wilhelmus van Nassouwe (Het Wilhelmus) is the national anthem of the Netherlands and is the oldest national anthem in the world. The anthem was first written down in 1574 (during the Dutch Revolt). The Japanese anthem, Kimigayo, has the oldest (9th century) lyrics, but a melody was only added in the late 19th century, making it a poem rather than an anthem for most of its lifespan. Although the Wilhelmus was not officially recognised as the Dutch national anthem until 1932, it has always been popular with parts of the Dutch population and resurfaced on several occasions in the course of Dutch history before gaining its present status.
Columba is a small, faint constellation created in the late sixteenth century. Its name is Latin for dove. It is located just south of Canis Major and Lepus. Columba was created by Dutch astronomer Petrus Plancius in 1592 in order to differentiate the 'unformed stars' of the large constellation Canis Major. Plancius first depicted Columba on the small celestial planispheres of his large wall map of 1592. It is also shown on his smaller world map of 1594 and on early Dutch celestial globes.
The first person to record the phenomenon was Gerrit de Veer, a member of Willem Barentsz' ill-fated third expedition into the polar region. Novaya Zemlya, the archipelago where de Veer first observed the phenomenon, lends its name to the effect.
Apus is a faint constellation in the southern sky, first defined in the late 16th century. Its name means "no feet" in Greek, and it represents a bird-of-paradise (which were once believed to lack feet). Apus was one of twelve constellations created by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman and it first appeared on a 35 cm diameter celestial globe published in 1597 (or 1598) in Amsterdam by Plancius with Jodocus Hondius.
Chamaeleon is a small constellation in the southern sky. It is named after the chameleon, a kind of lizard. It was first defined in the 16th century. It was one of many constellations created by European explorers in the 15th and 16th centuries out of unfamiliar Southern Hemisphere stars. Chamaeleon was one of twelve constellations created by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman.
Dorado, a constellation in the southern sky, was named in the late 16th century and is now one of the 88 modern constellations. Dorado has been represented historically as a dolphinfish and a swordfish. It was one of twelve constellations created by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman.
Grus is a constellation in the southern sky. Its name is Latin for the crane, a species of bird. The stars that form Grus were originally considered part of Piscis Austrinus (the southern fish). The stars were first defined as a separate constellation by Petrus Plancius, who created twelve new constellations based on the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman.
Hydrus is a small constellation in the southern sky, created in the late sixteenth century. Its name means "male water snake". Hydrus was one of twelve constellations created by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman.
Created in the late sixteenth century, Indus represents an Indian, a word that could refer at the time to any native of Asia or the Americas. The constellation was one of twelve created by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman.
Musca is one of the minor southern constellations. The constellation was one of twelve constellations created by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman and it first appeared on a 35-cm diameter celestial globe published in 1597 (or 1598) in Amsterdam by Petrus Plancius and Jodocus Hondius. The first depiction of this constellation in a celestial atlas was in Johann Bayer's Uranometria of 1603.
Pavo is a constellation in the southern sky. Its name is Latin for peacock. It is one of twelve constellations created by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman.
Phoenix is a minor constellation in the southern sky. It was after the mythical phoenix. Phoenix was the largest of the twelve constellations established by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman.
Triangulum Australe is a small constellation in the far southern celestial hemisphere. Its name is Latin for "the southern triangle", which distinguishes it from Johann Bayer in his 1603 Uranometria.
Tucana is a constellation of stars in the southern sky, created in the late sixteenth century. Its name is Latin for the toucan, a South American bird. The constellation was one of twelve created by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman.
Volans is a constellation in the southern sky. It represents a flying fish; its name is a shortened form of its original name, Piscis Volans. It was one of twelve constellations created by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman in the late sixteenth century.
Camelopardalis was created by Petrus Plancius in 1613 to represent the animal Rebecca rode to marry Isaac in the Bible. One year later, Jakob Bartsch featured it in his atlas. Johannes Hevelius gave it the official name of "Camelopardus" or "Camelopardalis" because he saw the constellation's many faint stars as the spots of a giraffe.
Monoceros is a relatively modern constellation. Its first certain appearance was on a globe created by the Dutch cartographer Petrus Plancius in 1612 or 1613 and it was later charted by Jakob Bartsch as Unicornus in his star chart of 1624.
In 1655, Christiaan Huygens became the first person to suggest that Saturn was surrounded by a ring, after Galileo's much less advanced telescope had failed to show rings. Galileo had reported the anomaly as possibly 3 planets instead of one.
In 1655, using a 50 power refracting telescope that he designed himself, Christiaan Huygens discovered the first of Saturn's moons, Titan.
In 1932, Dutch astronomer Jan Oort became the first person to discover evidence of dark matter. The existence of dark matter was proposed when Jan Oort measured the motions of nearby stars in the Milky Way relative to the galactic plane. He found that the mass of the galactic plane must be more than the mass of the material that can be seen. A year later (1933), Fritz Zwicky examined the dynamics of clusters of galaxies and found their movements similarly perplexing.
Miranda is the smallest and innermost of Uranus's five major moons. It was discovered by Gerard Kuiper on February 16, 1948 at McDonald Observatory.
Nereid, also known as Neptune II, is the third-largest moon of Neptune and was the second moon of Neptune to be discovered. Nereid was discovered on May 1, 1949, by Gerard Kuiper, on photographic plates taken with the 82-inch telescope at the McDonald Observatory.
Dutch physician & anatomist Regnier de Graaf may have been the first to understand the reproductive function of the Fallopian tube, described the hydrosalpinx, linking its development to female infertility. Regnier de Graaf recognized pathologic conditions of the tubes. He was aware of tubal pregnancies, and he surmised that the mammalian egg traveled from the ovary to the uterus through the Fallopian tube.
In his De Mulierum Organis Generatione Inservientibus (1672), Dutch physician & anatomist Regnier de Graaf provided the first thorough description of the female gonad and established that it produced the ovum. De Graaf used the terminology vesicle or egg (ovum) for what now called the ovarian follicle. Because the fluid-filled ovarian vesicles had been observed previously by others, including Andreas Vesalius and Falloppio, De Graaf did not claim priority to their discovery. He himself pointed out that he was not the first to describe them, but described their development. De Graaf was the first to observe changes in the ovary before and after mating and describe the corpus luteum. From the observation of pregnancy in rabbits, he concluded that the follicle contained the oocyte. The mature stage of the ovarian follicle is called the Graafian follicle in his honour, although others, including Fallopius, had noticed the follicles previously but failed to recognize its reproductive significance.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is often considered to be the father of microbiology. While Robert Hooke is cited as the first to record microscopic observation of the fruiting bodies of molds, in 1665. But the first observation of microbes using a microscope is generally credited to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. In 1670s, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek observed and researched bacteria and other microorganisms, using a single-lens microscope of his own design.
Photosynthesis is an important biochemical process in which plants, algae, and some bacteria convert the energy of sunlight to chemical energy. The process was discovered by Jan Ingenhousz in 1779. The chemical energy is used to drive synthetic reactions such as the formation of sugars or the fixation of nitrogen into amino acids, the building blocks for protein synthesis. Ultimately, nearly all living things depend on energy produced from photosynthesis for their nourishment, making it vital to life on Earth. It is also responsible for producing the oxygen that makes up a large portion of the Earth's atmosphere. Organisms that produce energy through photosynthesis are called photoautotrophs. Plants are the most visible representatives of photoautotrophs, but bacteria and algae also contribute to the conversion of free energy into usable energy.
Plant respiration was also discovered by Jan Ingenhousz in 1779.
Martinus Beijerinck is considered one of the founders of virology. In 1898, he published results on the filtration experiments demonstrating that tobacco mosaic disease is caused by an infectious agent smaller than a bacterium. His results were in accordance with the similar observation made by Dmitri Ivanovsky in 1892. Like Ivanovsky before him and Adolf Mayer, predecessor at Wageningen, Beijerinck could not culture the filterable infectious agent, however he concluded that the agent can replicate and multiply in living plants. He named the new pathogen virus to indicate its non-bacterial nature and this discovery is considered to be the beginning of virology.
Flemish physician Jan Baptist van Helmont is sometimes considered the founder of pneumatic chemistry, coining the word gas and conducting experiments involving gases.
In carbohydrate chemistry, the Lobry de Bruyn–van Ekenstein transformation is the base or acid catalyzed transformation of an aldose into the ketose isomer or vice versa, with a tautomeric enediol as reaction intermediate. The Lobry de Bruyn–van Ekenstein transformation is relevant for the industrial production of certain ketoses and was discovered in 1885 by Cornelis Adriaan Lobry van Troostenburg de Bruyn and Willem Alberda van Ekenstein.
The Prins reaction is an Prins reaction. The first one, the addition of polyhalogen compounds to olefins, was found during the doctoral research of Prins, the second one, on the acid-catalyzed addition of aldehydes to olefinic compounds, became of much industrial relevance.
The Dutch physicist Dirk Coster and the Hungarian-Swedish chemist George de Hevesy co-discovered Hafnium (Hf) in 1923, by means of X-ray spectroscopic analysis of zirconium ore. Hafnium' is named after Hafnia', the Latin name for Copenhagen (Denmark), where it was discovered.
The crystal bar process (also known as iodide process or the van Arkel–de Boer process) was developed by Dutch chemists Anton Eduard van Arkel and Jan Hendrik de Boer in 1925. This process was the first industrial process for the commercial production of pure ductile metallic zirconium. It is used in the production of small quantities of ultra-pure titanium and zirconium.
In 1889, the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries published his book Intracellular Pangenesis, in which, based on a modified version of Charles Darwin's theory of Pangenesis of 1868, he postulated that different characters have different hereditary carriers. He specifically postulated that inheritance of specific traits in organisms comes in particles. He called these units pangenes, a term 20 years later (1909) to be shortened to genes by the Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen.
1900 marked the "rediscovery of Mendelian genetics". The significance of Gregor Mendel's work was not understood until early in the twentieth century, after his death, when his research was re-discovered by other scientists working on similar problems: Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak. Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries rediscovered (independently with Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak) the laws of heredity in the 1890s while unaware of Gregor Mendel's work, for introducing the term "mutation", and for developing a mutation theory of evolution. They all worked independently on different plant hybrids, and came to the same conclusions about rules of inheritance as Mendel.
The Bushveld Igneous Complex (or BIC) is a large layered igneous intrusion within the Earth's crust which has been tilted and eroded and now outcrops around what appears to be the edge of a great geological basin, the Transvaal Basin. Located in South Africa, the BIC contains some of the richest ore deposits on Earth. The complex contains the world's largest reserves of platinum group metals (PGMs), platinum, palladium, osmium, iridium, rhodium, and ruthenium, along with vast quantities of iron, tin, chromium, titanium and vanadium. The site was discovered around 1897 by Gustaaf Molengraaff, a Dutch geologist.
René Descartes (1596-1650) was born in France but spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. As Bertrand Russell noted in his A History of Western Philosophy (1945): "He lived in Holland for twenty years (1629-49), except for a few brief visits to France and one to England, all on business....". In 1637, Descartes published his work on the methods of science, Discours de la méthode in Leiden. One of the three appendices to his work was La Géométrie, in which he outlined a method to connect the expressions of algebra with the diagrams of geometry. It combined both algebra and geometry under one specialty — algebraic geometry, called analytic geometry, which involves reducing geometry to a form of arithmetic and algebra and translating geometric shapes into algebraic equations.
Descartes originally published his Discours de la méthode in Leiden. Later, it was translated into Latin and published in 1656 in Amsterdam. The book was intended as an introduction to three works Dioptrique, Météores and Géométrie. La Géométrie contains Descartes' first introduction of the Cartesian coordinate system.
Brouwer fixed-point theorem is a fixed-point theorem in topology, named after Luitzen Brouwer, who proved it in 1911.
Christiaan Huygens coined the term "centrifugal force" in his 1659 De Vi Centrifiga and wrote of it in his 1673 Horologium Oscillatorium on pendulums.
Christiaan Huygens observed that two of his pendulum clocks mounted next to each other on the same support often become synchronized, swinging in opposite directions. In 1665, He reported the results by letter to the Royal Society of London and it is referred to it as "an odd kind of sympathy" in the Society's minutes. This may be the first published observation of what is now called coupled oscillations. In the 20th century, coupled oscillators took on great practical importance because of two discoveries: lasers, in which different atoms give off light waves that all oscillate in unison, and superconductors, in which pairs of electrons oscillate in synchrony, allowing electricity to flow with almost no resistance. Coupled oscillators are even more ubiquitous in nature, showing up, for example, in the synchronized flashing of fireflies and chirping of crickets, and in the pacemaker cells that regulate heartbeats.
Flemish anatomist and physician Andreas Vesalius is often referred to as the founder of modern human anatomy with the publication of the seven-volume De humani corporis fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body) in 1543.
In 1679, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek used one of his microscopes to assess tophaceous material and found that gouty tophi consist of aggregates of needle-shaped crystals, and not globules of chalk as was believed until then.
Boerhaave syndrome (also known as spontaneous esophageal perforation or esophageal rupture) refers to an oesophageal rupture secondary to forceful vomiting. Originally described in 1724 by Dutch physician/botanist Hermann Boerhaave, it is a rare condition with high mortality. The syndrome was described after the case of a Dutch admiral Baron Jan von Wassenaer who died of the condition.
Factor V Leiden is an inherited disorder of blood clotting. It is a variant of human factor V that causes a hypercoagulability disorder. It is named after the city Leiden (Netherlands), where it was first identified in Leiden by Professor R. Bertina et al. in 1994.
The first person to observe and describe red blood cells was the Dutch biologist Jan Swammerdam, who had used an early microscope in 1658 to study the blood of a frog.
Infusoria is a collective term for minute aquatic creatures like ciliate, euglena, paramecium, protozoa and unicellular algae that exist in freshwater pond water. However, in formal classification microorganism called infusoria belongs to Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Protozoa, Class Ciliates (Infusoria).They were first discovered by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek.
In 1674, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek was the first person to observe and describe protozoa.
The first bacteria were observed by Anton van Leeuwenhoek in 1676 using a single-lens microscope of his own design. The creatures he saw were described as small creatures. The name bacterium was introduced much later, by Ehrenberg in 1828, derived from the Greek word βακτηριον meaning "small stick". Because of the difficulty in describing individual bacteria and the importance of their discovery to fields such as medicine, biochemistry and geochemistry, the history of bacteria is generally described as the history of microbiology.
A spermatozoon or spermatozoon (pl. spermatozoa), from the ancient Greek σπερμα (seed) and ζων (alive) and more commonly known as a sperm cell, is the haploid cell that is the male gamete. It joins an ovum to form a zygote. A zygote can grow into a new organism, such as a human being. Sperm cells contribute half of the genetic information to the diploid offspring. In mammals, the sex of the offspring is determined by the sperm cells: a spermatozoon bearing a Y chromosome will lead to a male (XY) offspring, while one bearing an X chromosome will lead to a female (XX) offspring ( the ovum always provides an X chromosome). Sperm cells were first observed by a student of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in 1677. Leeuwenhoek pictured sperm cells with great accuracy.
Volvox is a genus of chlorophytes, a type of green algae. It forms spherical colonies of up to 50,000 cells. They live in a variety of freshwater habitats, and were first reported by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1700.
Biological nitrogen fixation was discovered by the Dutch microbiologist Martinus Beijerinck in 1885.
Dutch microbiologist Martinus Beijerinck discovered the phenomenon of bacterial sulfate reduction, a form of anaerobic respiration. He learned bacteria could use sulfate as a terminal electron acceptor, instead of oxygen. Spirillum desulfuricans (Spirillum), the first known sulfate-reducing bacterium, was isolated and described by Beijerinck.
In 1898, the Dutch microbiologist Martinus Beijerinck first coined the term of "virus" to indicate that the causal agent of tobacco mosaic disease was of non-bacterial nature. Beijerinck discovered what is now known as the tobacco mosaic virus. He observed that the agent multiplied only in cells that were dividing and he called it a contagium vivum fluidum (contagious living fluid). Martinus Beijerinck's discovery is considered to be the beginning of virology.
Martinus Beijerinck is credited with developing the first enrichment culture, a fundamental method of studying microbes from the environment.
Java Man (Homo erectus erectus) is the name given to hominid fossils discovered in 1891 at Trinil - Ngawi Regency on the banks of the Solo River in East Java, Indonesia, one of the first known specimens of Homo erectus. Its discoverer, Dutch paleontologist Eugène Dubois, gave it the scientific name Pithecanthropus erectus, a name derived from Greek and Latin roots meaning upright ape-man.
Christiaan Huygens is remembered especially for his wave theory of light, which he first communicated in 1678 to France's Royal Académie des sciences and which he published in 1690 in his Treatise on light. His argument that light consists of waves now known as the Huygens–Fresnel principle, which two centuries later became instrumental in the understanding of wave-particle duality. The interference experiments of Thomas Young vindicated Huygens' s wave theory in 1801.
In his Traité de la Lumiere, Christiaan Huygens showed how Snell's law of sines could be explained by, or derived from, the wave nature of light, using what we have come to call the Huygens–Fresnel principle.
Bernoulli's principle was discovered by the Dutch-Swiss mathematician and physicist Daniel Bernoulli and named after him.
In 1785, Jan Ingenhousz described the irregular movement of coal dust on the surface of alcohol and therefore has a claim as discoverer of what came to be known as Brownian motion.
The law takes its name from the Dutch meteorologist C. H. D. Buys Ballot, who published it in the Comptes Rendus, November 1857. While William Ferrel theorized this first in 1856, Buys Ballot was the first to provide an empirical validation.
The van der Waals forces named after the Dutch physicist Johannes van der Waals, who first described them in 1873. Van der Waals noted the non-ideality of gases and attributed it to the existence of molecular or atomic interactions. They are forces which are developed between the atoms inside molecules and keep them together.
This is called the Lorentz force law, after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz who first formulated it.
The physical effect discovered by Dutch physicist Pieter Zeeman and named after him.
Helium was first liquefied (liquid helium) on July 10, 1908, by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes.
Physical phenomena discovered by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes.
In dynamical systems, the Van der Pol oscillator is a non-conservative oscillator with non-linear damping. It was originally proposed by the Dutch physicist Balthasar van der Pol while he was working at Philips in 1920. Van der Pol studied a differential equation that describes the circuit of a vacuum tube. It has been used to model other phenomenon such as the human heartbeat by his colleague, Jan van der Mark.
In 1925, Dutch physicists George Eugene Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit introduced (co-discovered) the concept of electron's spin, which posits an intrinsic angular momentum for all electrons.
In 1926, Dutch physicist Willem Hendrik Keesom, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes's student, invented a method to freeze liquid helium and was the first person who was able to solidify helium.
The de Haas–van Alphen effect, often abbreviated to dHvA, is a quantum mechanical effect in which the P. M. van Alphen.
In quantum field theory, the Casimir effect and the Casimir–Polder force are physical forces arising from a quantized field. Dutch physicists Hendrik Casimir and Dirk Polder at Philips Research Labs proposed the existence of a force between two polarizable atoms and between such an atom and a conducting plate in 1947, and, after a conversation with Niels Bohr who suggested it had something to do with zero-point energy, Casimir alone formulated the theory predicting a force between neutral conducting plates in 1948; the former is called the Casimir–Polder force while the latter is the Casimir effect in the narrow sense.
Tellegen's theorem is one of the most powerful theorems in network theory. Most of the energy distribution theorems and extremum principles in network theory can be derived from it. It was published in 1952 by Bernard Tellegen. Fundamentally, Tellegen's theorem gives a simple relation between magnitudes that satisfy Kirchhoff's laws of electrical circuit theory.
During his first journey in 1594, Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz discovered the Orange Islands.
On 10 June 1596, Dutch explorers Willem Barentsz and Jacob van Heemskerk discovered Bear Island, a week before their discovery of Spitsbergen.
On 17 June 1596, Dutch explorers Willem Barentsz and Jacob van Heemskerk discovered Spitsbergen while searching for the Northern Sea Route.
The Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz made the first indisputable discovery of Svalbard in 1596, in an attempt to find the Northern Sea Route. The name Spitsbergen, meaning "pointed mountains" (from the Dutch spits - pointed, bergen - mountains), was at first applied to both the main island and the archipelago as a whole.
The first reliable sighting is usually attributed to the Dutch explorer Sebald de Weert in 1600, who named the archipelago the Sebald Islands, a name they bore on Dutch maps into the 19th century.
The first undisputed sighting of Australia by a European was made on 26 February 1606. The Dutch vessel Duyfken, captained by Willem Janszoon, followed the coast of New Guinea, missed Torres Strait, and explored perhaps 350 km of western side of Cape York, in the Gulf of Carpentaria, believing the land was still part of New Guinea. The Dutch made one landing, but were promptly attacked by Aborigines and subsequently abandoned further exploration.[6]
The area that is now Manhattan was long inhabited by the Lenape Indians. In 1524, Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano – sailing in service of the king Francis I of France – was the first European to visit the area that would become New York City. It was not until the voyage of Henry Hudson, an Englishman who worked for the Dutch East India Company, that the area was mapped.
At the time of the arrival of the first Europeans in the 17th century, the area of Hudson Valley was inhabited primarily by the Algonquian-speaking Mahican and Munsee Native American people, known collectively as River Indians. The first Dutch settlement was in the 1610s with the establishment of Fort Nassau, a trading post (factorij) south of modern-day Albany, with the purpose of exchanging European goods for beaver pelts. Fort Nassau was later replaced by Fort Orange. During the rest of the 17th century, the Hudson Valley formed the heart of the New Netherland colony operations, with the New Amsterdam settlement on Manhattan serving as a post for supplies and defense of the upriver operations.
The Brouwer Route was a route for sailing from the Cape of Good Hope to Java. The Route took ships south from the Cape into the Roaring Forties, then east across the Indian Ocean, before turning northwest for Java. Thus it took advantage of the strong westerly winds for which the Roaring Forties are named, greatly increasing travel speed. It was devised by the Dutch sea explorer Hendrik Brouwer in 1611, and found to halve the duration of the journey from Europe to Java, compared to the previous Arab and Portuguese monsoon route, which involved following the coast of East Africa northwards, sailing through the Mozambique Channel and then across the Indian Ocean, sometimes via India. The Brouwer Route played a major role in the discovery of the west coast of Australia, and the very large numbers of ships that were wrecked along that coast.
After unconfirmed reports of Dutch discovery as early as 1611, the island was named after Dutchman Jan Jacobszoon May van Schellinkhout who visited the island in July 1614. As locations of these islands were kept secret by the whalers, Jan Mayen only got its current name in 1620.
The name "Hell Gate" is a corruption of the Dutch phrase Hellegat, which could mean either "hell's hole" or "bright gate/passage", which was originally applied to the entirety of the East River. The strait was described in the journals of Dutch explorer Adriaen Block, who is the first European known to have navigated the strait, during his 1614 voyage aboard the Onrust.
The first European to record the existence of Long Island Sound was the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block, who entered the sound from the East River in 1614.
The first European to see the Connecticut River was the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block in 1614.
Fishers Island was called Munnawtawkit by the Native American Pequot nation. Adriaen Block, the first recorded European visitor, named it Visher's Island in 1614, after one of his companions. For the next 25 years, it remained a wilderness, visited occasionally by Dutch traders.
On 25 December 1615, Dutch explorers Jacob le Maire and Willem Schouten aboard the Eendracht, discovered Staten Island, close to Cape Horn.
On 29 January 1616, the Dutch ship Eendracht with explorers Jacob le Maire and Willem Schouten sighted land they called Cape Horn, after the city of Hoorn in Holland. Aboard the Eendracht was the crew of the recently wrecked ship called Hoorn.
The Dutch ship Eendracht with explorers Jacob le Maire and Willem Schouten discovered Tonga on 21 April 1616.
The Dutch ship Eendracht with explorers Jacob le Maire and Willem Schouten discovered the Hoorn Islands on 28 April 1616.
The Dutch ship Eendracht with explorers Jacob le Maire and Willem Schouten discovered the New Ireland around May–July 1616.
The Dutch ship Eendracht with explorers Jacob le Maire and Willem Schouten discovered the Schouten Islands (also known as Biak Islands or Geelvink Islands) on 24 July 1616.
Schouten Islands (also known as Eastern Schouten Islands or Le Maire Islands) of Papua New Guinea, named after Willem Schouten, who visited them in 1616.
The first sighting of the Houtman Abrolhos by Europeans was by the Dutch VOC ships Dordrecht and Amsterdam in 1619, only three years after Dirk Hartog made the first authenticated sighting of what is now Western Australia, and only 13 years after the first authenticated voyage to Australia, that of the Duyfken in 1606. Discovery of the islands was credited to Frederick de Houtman, Captain-General of the Dordrecht, as it was Houtman who later wrote of the discovery in a letter to the directors of the Dutch East India Company.
The first known European explorer to visit the region was the Dutch Willem Janszoon (also known as Willem Jansz) in his 1606 voyage. His fellow countryman, Jan Carstenszoon (also known as Jan Carstensz), visited in 1623 and named the gulf in honour of Pieter de Carpentier, at that time the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. Abel Tasman also explored the coast in 1644.
The Staaten River is a river in the Cape York Peninsula, Australia that rises more than 200 km to the west of Cairns and empties into the Gulf of Carpentaria. The river was first named by Dutch sea explorer Jan Carstenszoon (also known as Jan Carstensz) in 1623.
In 1623 Netherlands.
Groote Eylandt was first sighted by Europeans in 1623, by the Abel Tasman arrived, that the island was given a European name. Its name is Dutch for "Large Island" in an archaic spelling. The modern Dutch spelling is Groot Eiland.
In February 1624, Dutch admiral Jacques l'Hermite discovered the Hermite Islands at Cape Horn.
In 1627, Dutch explorers François Thijssen and Pieter Nuyts explored about 1800 km of the Southern Australia coast, from Cape Leeuwin to Ceduna.
St Francis Island (originally in Dutch: Eyland St. François) is an island on the south coast of South Australia near Ceduna. It is part of the Isles of Saint Francis conservation park. It was one of the first parts of South Australia to be discovered and named by Europeans, along with St Peter Island, mapped by François Thijssen in 1627. It named by Thijssen after his patron saint. The island is part of the Nuyts Archipelago Important Bird Area (IBA), so identified by BirdLife International because it supports over 1% of the world populations of Short-tailed Shearwaters, White-faced Storm-Petrels and Pied Oystercatchers.
St Peter Island is an island on the south coast of South Australia near Ceduna to the south of Denial Bay. It is the second largest island in South Australia and about 13 km long. It was one of the first parts of South Australia to be discovered and named by Europeans, along with St Francis Island, mapped by François Thijssen in 1627. The island is part of the Nuyts Archipelago Important Bird Area (IBA). It lies across the Yatala Channel from the separate Tourville and Murat Bays Important Bird Area, just west of Ceduna on the mainland. It was named in 1627 by Thijssen after Pieter Nuyts' patron saint.
West Wallabi Island and East Wallabi Island played an important role in the story of the Batavia shipwreck and massacre. Following the shipwreck in 1629, a group of soldiers under the command of Wiebbe Hayes were put ashore on West Wallabi Island to search for water. A group of mutineers who took control of the other survivors left them there in the hope that they would starve or die of thirst. However the soldiers discovered that they could wade to East Wallabi Island, where there was a fresh water spring. Furthermore, West and East Wallabi Islands are the only islands in the group upon which the Tammar Wallaby lives. Thus the soldiers had access to sources of both food and water that were unavailable to the mutineers. Later the mutineers mounted a series of attacks, which the soldiers beat off. The Weibbe Hayes Stone Fort, remnants of improvised defensive walls and stone shelters built by Wiebbe Hayes and his men on the West Wallabi Island, are Australia's oldest known European structures, more than 150 years before expeditions to the Australian continent by James Cook and Arthur Phillip.
In 1642, Abel Tasman sailed from Mauritius and on 24 November, sighted Tasmania. He named Tasmania Van Diemen's Land, after Anthony van Diemen, the Dutch East India Company's Governor General at Batavia, who had commissioned his voyage. Tasman claimed Van Diemen's Land for the Netherlands.
Maatsuyker Islands, a group of small islands that are the southernmost point of the Australian continent. They were discovered by Abel Tasman in 1642 and named by him after a Dutch official. The main islands of the group are De Witt Island (354 m), Maatsuyker Island (296 m), Flat Witch Island, Flat Top Island, Round Top Island, Walker Island, Needle Rocks and Mewstone.
Maria Island was named in 1642 by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman after Maria van Diemen (née van Aelst), wife of Anthony van Diemen, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies in Batavia. The island was known as Maria's Isle in the early 19th century.
Abel Tasman led the first known European expedition to sight Tasmania. His journal entry for 29 November 1642 records that he observed a rock which was similar to a rock named Pedra Branca off China, presumably referring to the Pedra Branca in the South China Sea.
Schouten Island is a 28 km2 island in eastern Tasmania, Australia. It lies 1.6 kilometres south of Freycinet Peninsula and is a part of Freycinet National Park. In 1642, while surveying the south-west coast of Tasmania, Abel Tasman named the island after Joost Schouten, a member of the Council of the Dutch East India Company.
Storm Bay is a large bay in the south-east of Tasmania, Australia. It is the entrance to the Derwent River estuary and the port of Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania. It is bordered by Bruny Island to the west and the Tasman Peninsula to the east. The first European to reach Storm Bay was the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1642.
In 1642, during the same expedition, Tasman discovered New Zealand.
In 1643, still during the same expedition, Tasman discovered Fiji.
Tongatapu and Haʻapai were discovered by Europeans in 1643 by Abel Tasman commanding two ships, the Heemskerck and the Zeehaen commissioned by the Dutch East India Company of Batavia (Jakarta). The expedition's goals were to chart the unknown southern and eastern seas and to find a possible passage through the South Pacific and Indian Ocean providing a faster route to Chile.
The first European known to visit Sakhalin was Martin Gerritz de Vries, who mapped Cape Patience and Cape Aniva on the island's east coast in 1643.
In the summer of 1643, the Castricum, under command of Maarten Gerritsz Vries sailed by the southern Kuril Islands, visiting Kunashir, Iturup, and Urup, which they named "Company Island" and claimed for the Netherlands.
Vries Strait or Miyabe Line is a strait between two main islands of the Kurils. It is located between the northeastern end of the island of Iturup and the southwestern headland of Urup Island, connecting the Sea of Okhotsk on the west with the Pacific Ocean on the east. The strait is named after Dutch explorer Maarten Gerritsz Vries, the first recorded European to explore the area in 1643.
Gulf of Patience is a large body of water off the southeastern coast of Sakhalin, Russia, between the main body of Sakhalin Island in the west and Cape Patience in the east. It is part of the Sea of Okhotsk. The first Europeans to visit the bay were the crew of the Dutch ship Castricum, captained by Maarten Gerritsz Vries, who were there in the summer of 1643, They named the gulf in memory of their having to wait for the fog to clear in order for them to continue with their expedition.
The first Europeans known to land on the Weseltje and anchored on the northern side of the island, near The Basin.
On 10 January 1697, Willem de Vlamingh ventured up the Swan River. He and his crew are believed to have been the first Europeans to do so. He named the Swan River (Zwaanenrivier in Dutch) after the large numbers of black swans that he observed there.
On Easter Sunday, 5 April 1722, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen discovered Easter Island.
On 13 June 1722, after his discovery of Easter Island, Jacob Roggeveen discovered the Samoa islands.
The Orange River was named by Colonel Robert Gordon, commander of the Dutch East India Company garrison at Cape Town, on a trip to the interior in 1779.
In 1595, Petrus Plancius, a key promoter to the East Indies expeditions, asked Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser, the chief pilot on the Hollandia, to make observations to fill in the blank area around the south celestial pole on European maps of the southern sky. Plancius had instructed Keyser to map the skies in the southern hemisphere, which were largely uncharted at the time. Keyser died in Java the following year but his catalogue of 135 stars, probably measured up with the help of explorer-colleague Frederick de Houtman, was delivered to Plancius, and then those stars were arranged into 12 new southern constellations, letting them be inscribed on a 35-cm celestial globe that was prepared in late 1597 (or early 1598). This globe was produced in collaboration with the Amsterdam cartographer Jodocus Hondius.
Plancius's constellations (mostly referring to animals and subjects described in natural history books and travellers' journals of his day) are Apis the Bee (later changed to Musca by Lacaille), Apus the Bird of Paradise, Chamaeleon, Dorado the Goldfish (or Swordfish), Grus the Crane, Hydrus the Small Water Snake, Indus the Indian, Pavo the Peacock, Phoenix, Triangulum Australe the Southern Triangle, Tucana the Toucan, and Volans the Flying Fish. The acceptance of these new constellations was assured when Johann Bayer, a German astronomer, included them in his Uranometria of 1603, the leading star atlas of its day. These 12 southern constellations are still recognized today by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
Within the thirty-year period the Dutch West India Company controlled the northeast region of Brazil (1624–1654), the seven-year governorship of Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen was marked by an intense ethnographic exploration. To that end, Johan Maurits brought from Europe with him a team of artists and scientists who lived in Recife between 1637 and 1644: painter Albert Eckhout (specializing in the human figure), painter Frans Post (landscape painter), natural historian Georg Marcgraf (who also produced drawings and prints), and the physician Willem Piso. Together with Georg Marcgraf, and originally published by Joannes de Laet, Piso wrote the Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (1648), an important early western insight into Brazilian flora and fauna, also is the first scientific book about Brazil. Albert Eckhout, along with the landscape artist Frans Post, was one of two formally trained painters charged with recording the complexity of the local scene. The seven years Eckhout spent in Brazil constitute an invaluable contribution to the understanding of the European colonization of the New World. During his stay he created hundreds of oil sketches - mostly from life - of the local flora, fauna and people. These paintings by Eckhout and the landscapes by Post were among the Europeans' first, introductions to South America.
In 1641, American Indians and their customs, reports on the abundance of the area's agriculture and wealth of its natural resources.
Dutch seafarer and VOC's bookkeeper Hendrick Hamel was the first westerner to experience first-hand and write about Korea in Joseon era (1392-1897). In 1653, Hamel and his men were shipwrecked on Jeju island, and they remained captives in Korea for more than a decade. The Joseon dynasty was often referred to as the "Hermit Kingdom" for its harsh isolationism and closed borders. The shipwrecked Dutchmen were given some freedom of movement, but were forbidden to leave the country. After thirteen years (1653-1666), Hamel and seven of his crewmates managed to escape to the VOC trading mission at Dejima (an artificial island in the bay of Nagasaki, Japan), and from there to the Netherlands. In 1666, three different publishers published his report (Journal van de Ongeluckige Voyage van 't Jacht de Sperwer or An account of the shipwreck of a Dutch vessel on the coast of the isle of Quelpaert together with the description of the kingdom of Corea), describing their improbable adventure and giving the first detailed and accurate description of Korea to the western world.
| deutsch | english | español | français | русский |