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By Duncan Roberts and Audrey McGaw | Illustrations: Sabina Palanca and Mara Mohnen┃ Webdesign: Christian Mertes

1882

The lead-acid battery

Rosport-born Henri Tudor, an electricity genius, was arguably Luxembourg’s greatest inventor. In 1882 he put into service the forerunner of what we now know as the lead-acid battery.

The accumulator was able to store and distribute electricity – a vast improvement on previous inventions, such as Gaston Planté’s pioneering 1859 version, which tended to short-circuit. Tudor’s first accumulator ran for 16 years straight.

Four years later, Henri and his brother Hubert convinced the town of Echternach to illuminate through electricity rather than petrol. At the 1905 Liège Exhibition, Tudor and his associates demonstrated portable energy in the form of an “energy-car”, though this was less commercially successful.

Science fiction

Luxembourger Hugo Gernsback, born Gernsbacher in Bonnevoie in 1884, is largely credited with coining the term science fiction.

Having studied electrical engineering, he emigrated to the United States in 1904 where he eventually invented a portable radio transmitter that foreshadowed the walkie-talkie.

He also founded a trade magazine, Modern Electrics, in which he first published an adventure story series set in the year 2660. This and further science-based stories became so popular that Gernsback launched a magazine dedicated to fiction, Amazing Stories. In 1929 he called his stories “scientifiction”, which evolved into the easier to pronounce “science fiction”.

Since 1953, the World Science Fiction Society has been awarding the Hugo Award, in honour of Gernsback.

1929

1970

The euro

Former Luxembourg Prime Minister Pierre Werner has been dubbed the father of the euro after the 1970 Werner Report outlined the broad lines, principles and stages of European economic and monetary union. The report was the result of seven months of meetings of experts from the then-six members of the European Community, all chaired by Werner.

The proposals set out in the report included a community system for central banks as well as strong macroeconomic governance, requiring the coordination of budgetary and monetary policies, and full financial integration. The euro was given the green light by the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. Banknotes and coins were introduced on 1 January 2002 and are now used by 20 EU member states.

Sky TV

It can be argued that without Luxembourg satellite company SES, Sky TV, and indeed the global appeal of England’s Premier League, would not have happened. A 1988 deal struck between Sky TV and SES Astra, as it was then known, allowed Rupert Murdoch’s nascent company to later snap up the first broadcast rights for football’s most popular league.

The Luxembourg company’s Astra 1A satellite, launched in December 1988, was the first European medium-powered satellite to host 16 TV channels, reaching millions of homes at relatively low cost.

And again, it was Pierre Werner, and his successor Jacques Santer, who displayed the foresight and tenacity to launch SES as they sought to make Luxembourg a key player in the future of broadcasting and help further diversify its economy.

1988

2003

Internet telephony

The pioneer of Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) communication, Skype, was established in Luxembourg in 2003.

The video conferencing technology used by Skype was invented by Estonian developers, but founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis decided to headquarter it in the Grand Duchy.

According to former Skype Managing Director Michael Jackson, the company wanted a country that “took data privacy seriously”, where they could easily speak to the regulator and that had good infrastructure. “We even convinced the government to invest in high-speed connections to Amsterdam and Frankfurt peering points,” he wrote on Reddit.

Skype was eventually sold to Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion. The service was discontinued in May 2025 in favour of Microsoft Teams.