Haarlem
Teylers Museum and its electrostatic machine.
Route by public transport ↗
From the telescope to Bluetooth.
A small country with lots of water and little space has to be clever. The Dutch were the first to look at the stars through a telescope, saw bacteria under a microscope, built a submarine, invented the stock market, the cassette and the CD, and helped create Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Some inventions came from workshops in Middelburg and Delft, others from the laboratories of Leiden, the Philips factories in Eindhoven or an office in Amsterdam. Below is a playful list of Dutch inventions and discoveries, each with the museum where you can see it. Pick a colour to filter. Then test yourself: how much of what the Dutch like to tell is true? Are carrots really orange to honour the House of Orange? And what does Leiden have to do with the word battery?
Inventions and discoveries with a Dutch stamp. Pick a colour.
Spectacle makers in Middelburg, often named as Zacharias Janssen, are linked to the first compound microscope.
Rijksmuseum Boerhaave →, LeidenCornelis Corneliszoon from Uitgeest lets the wind saw timber, so Holland builds ships faster than anyone.
Zaanse SchansHoorn gives the world the fluyt: a cheap cargo ship with lots of space and a small crew, the workhorse of the Golden Age.
Het Scheepvaartmuseum, AmsterdamThe VOC is the first company to issue shares anyone can buy and trade. Amsterdam gets the first modern stock exchange.
Hans Lipperhey from Middelburg applies for a patent on a spyglass that brings distant things close.
Zeeuws Museum, MiddelburgHugo Grotius writes Mare Liberum: the sea belongs to everyone. The start of international law.
Statue on the Markt, DelftCornelis Drebbel from Alkmaar takes a rowing boat under water along the Thames in London.
Leiden professor Willebrord Snellius describes how light bends when it passes from air into water.
Rijksmuseum Boerhaave →, LeidenChristiaan Huygens discovers Saturn's largest moon and, a few years later, explains that Saturn is surrounded by a ring.
Hofwijck, VoorburgHuygens builds a clock with a pendulum: for the first time, clocks keep time to within seconds a day.
Rijksmuseum Boerhaave →, LeidenJan van der Heyden fills Amsterdam with oil lamps and invents a fire engine with a hose.
With home-made lenses, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek from Delft is the first person to see bacteria and other tiny creatures in a drop of water.
Rijksmuseum Boerhaave →, LeidenDaniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, who lived and worked in the Dutch Republic, makes reliable mercury thermometers.
Rijksmuseum Boerhaave →, LeidenPieter van Musschenbroek stores electricity in a glass jar: the first capacitor.
Rijksmuseum Boerhaave →, LeidenTeylers Museum commissions a huge machine that throws sparks half a metre long. It is still there.
Teylers Museum →, HaarlemIn the early 19th century, Gouda bakers turn leftovers into a waffle with syrup. Now the whole world eats them, ideally on top of a cup of coffee.
GoudaWillem Einthoven measures the heart's electrical signals in Leiden: the electrocardiogram.
Rijksmuseum Boerhaave →, LeidenHeike Kamerlingh Onnes discovers that mercury, at extreme cold, carries current with no resistance at all.
Rijksmuseum Boerhaave →, LeidenFrits Zernike from Groningen makes transparent cells visible without staining them. Nobel Prize in 1953.
In the middle of the war, Willem Kolff builds the first working dialysis machine in Kampen.
DAF's Hub van Doorne gives the car a stepless belt-driven automatic gearbox. An idea that is still on the road.
DAF Museum →, EindhovenPhilips engineer Lou Ottens designs a tape that fits in your pocket. Music becomes portable.
Philips Museum →, EindhovenPhilips and Sony bring the compact disc to market together.
Philips Museum →, EindhovenThe showpiece of the Delta Works: a dam with gates that stays open to the tide and closes in a storm.
Deltapark Neeltje JansGuido van Rossum writes the Python programming language at CWI in Amsterdam, now one of the most popular in the world.
Dutch engineer Jaap Haartsen, working for Ericsson, develops the basis of Bluetooth.
Vic Hayes, the "father of Wi-Fi", chairs the committee that writes the standard; the technology was partly shaped at NCR in Nieuwegein.
Amsterdam's TomTom launches an affordable navigation device for the car.
One day, four moments. How to get the most out of your visit.
Six places to complete your museum day.
The museum of Dutch science: Van Leeuwenhoek's microscopes, Huygens' clocks, the Leyden jar and Kamerlingh Onnes' cold lab.
The oldest museum in the Netherlands, with the huge electrostatic machine of 1784, fossils and instruments in beautiful wooden cases.
From light bulb to cassette and CD: the story of the company that made Eindhoven, in the old factory where it began.
Working windmills, including a sawmill. See how wind powered the Golden Age.
The Huygens family's country house in Voorburg, now a museum about Constantijn and Christiaan Huygens.
Walk inside the Eastern Scheldt barrier and see how the Netherlands holds back the sea.
The Dutch love a good story. Guess first, then see the answer.
Carrots are orange to honour the House of Orange.
Dutch growers did make the orange carrot popular in the 17th century, but there is no evidence it was for Orange. A lovely story, nothing more.
The word battery comes from Leiden.
Almost! Benjamin Franklin called a row of linked Leyden jars a battery, like a battery of cannon. That is how the word came to electricity.
A Dutchman designed one of the first combustion engines.
Around 1673 Christiaan Huygens designed an engine driven by small gunpowder explosions in a cylinder. It was never really put to use, but it is a distant ancestor of the car engine.
The Dutch invented the sextant.
The sextant comes from England and America, around 1730. But Amsterdam mapmakers such as Blaeu made the best sea charts of their age.
Bluetooth is partly Dutch.
Jaap Haartsen, a Dutch engineer at Ericsson, laid the foundations in 1994. He is in the US National Inventors Hall of Fame.
The bicycle is a Dutch invention.
The bicycle's ancestor comes from Germany, in 1817. But the Netherlands has more bicycles than people.
The telescope is Dutch.
The oldest known patent application for a telescope is by Hans Lipperhey of Middelburg, in 1608. Galileo heard about it and built his own.
The world's first shares were Dutch.
From 1602 the VOC sold shares that could be freely traded. That was the start of the modern stock exchange, in Amsterdam.
Three day trips to inventions.
Teylers Museum and its electrostatic machine.
Route by public transport ↗The city of Van Leeuwenhoek and Grotius, with the Prinsenhof.
Route by public transport ↗The Philips Museum and the DAF Museum.
Route by public transport ↗Travel times are indicative. Live times on 9292.nl ↗.
From Leiden, Haarlem, Delft and The Hague are close by. Eindhoven and Zeeland make longer day trips.