A subgroup of the printers and publishers is entitled photo-journalists , where there are some well-known Germans. To give three, there are Alfred Eisenstaedt, Arthur Rothstein, and Edward Jean Steichen.
Papermaking was a skill of the earliest Germans. Here in Philadelphia, one of the four park squares is named for paper maker William Rittenhouse, a very early German to Pennsylvania. The Ephrata Press, which set a milestone in the size of a printing job, also made their own paper.
Next we come to the natural sciences and mathematics. America was very lucky to obtain much of the talent which was needed from German emigrants. In the decades of 1840 and 1850, the first wave came. Other notable decades were 1920 and 1930. Fifteen Nobel Prize winners found their way to America (the arrival and the award may have been reversed).
A couple of Germanna names are repeated among these emigrants, Moyer and Richter, though there is no close connection. We are all familiar with the Richter scale for measuring earthquakes. The inventor of this, Charles Francis Richter, would have been 100 years old this year.
In physics I recognize more of the names: Bethe, Bloch, Einstein, Feynmann, Hofstadter, Michelson, Oppenheimer, Rabi, and another Richter. Albert Einstein was selected by Time magazine as the man of the century.
Arguably, the contributions by this group of German-Americans were the most significant of any group.
On the military side, German has sent many soldiers or people who became soldiers. First, the British auxiliaries in the Revolutionary War left several thousand people to contribute to life here. Descendants of the Custer family, which included several military people, used to claim that Gen. Custer and others were descended from a British auxiliary. Like a lot of family history, it was all wrong. He was descended from a German, but it was one who emigrated before the Revolution, and who fought for the Americans, not the British.
Of the 3,394 individuals who had been awarded the Medal of Honor (since its inception in 1861), about 270 clearly have German names. An unknown number remain unrecognized as such because of name changes. The one name that we would all recognize is Edward V. Rickenbacker. I will continue and conclude this series with the next note.
(05 Aug 00)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.