The Inventor who beat Edison: Who is the 'King of Patents' with over 1,000 patents including the dowel?

Known as the 'Patent King', Fischer offered creative solutions to many problems encountered in daily life with the inventions he developed throughout his life.

German Inventor Artur Fischer, who has more than 1,100 patents, such as the first flash that works in sync with the camera (that is, fires when the photo is taken) or the screw anchor used to fix something on the wall of every house, died in 2016 at the age of 96.

Artur Fischer (31 December 1919 – 27 January 2016) was a German inventor. He is best known for inventing the plastic expanding wall plug. (Dowel)

Originally a locksmith, Fischer came up with the idea for his first patented invention while photographing his newborn daughter in 1947. In an interview in 2015, his starting point was “at that time, powder flash was used for sighs, which you lit with a cord. This was both a dangerous method and producing poor quality photos.” When he developed a synchronous mechanism and sold this idea to the photography giant Agfa, he took the first step of his 70-year career of invention.

For the rest of his life, Fischer continued to "invent" to solve technology bottlenecks. In 1958, the curiosity was a problem faced by construction workers and amateur mechanics: How to place the screw securely in the wall. For this, Fischer made this problem a thing of the past by inventing the piece we call 'the dowel' today. Millions of these tiny inventions are produced every day around the world today.

In other words, Fischer is in the repair business what Bill Gates or Steve Jobs are to the IT world. The fact that the number of patents registered in his name is above the world's most famous inventor, Thomas Edison, with 1,093 patents is one of the proofs of this. Fischer was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the European Patent Office in 2014 for these inventions.

Artur Fischer, who was born on 31 December in Tumlingen, Germany, was the son of a tailor. His mother, who was responsible for ironing next to his father, noticed his son's mechanical intelligence at a young age and supported him in this direction. He bought her a repair kit so he could build a workbench at home. Although Artur was enrolled in a vocational school, he left school at the age of 13 and became an apprentice to a locksmith in Stuttgart. During the war years, he enrolled in the Adolf Hitler Youth Group and applied to the army with the dream of becoming a pilot. But he was too short to be a pilot; Moreover, his eyes were nearsighted and he did not have a high school diploma. He was trained as a mechanic in the Luftwaffe, which Hitler visited unannounced in 1939. Although he survived the Battle of Stalingrad, he was captured in Italy and sent to England.

When he returned home in 1946, he took a job as an assistant in an engineering firm. In 1948, he laid the foundations of his own company as the Fischer Group. The company, which sells 14 thousand products in more than a hundred countries, had 42 dealers and 4,000 employees worldwide in 2016.