Leonardo da Vinci is considered as one of the fathers of modern bionics. Around the year 1500, he sketched a set of function-unfit flight apparatuses after the model of bird rockers. Approximately 400 years later, Otto Lilienthal was more successful: His hanging glider, manufactured according to studies at stork wings, carried the "father of the gliding flight " as far as 250 meters over Brandenburger country.

Up to the center of our century, there were repeated efforts of individual researchers to make natural forms and principles for the technique usable. However, a science with university rank became from it only at the beginning of the sixties.

The Botanist William Barthlott and his colleague Nesta Ehler discovered in the middle of the seventies actually purely coincidentally the self cleaning effect, also called "Lotus effect".

1977, the biologists describe this phenomenon - in a small marginal note. It appears to them too trivially, in order to attach greater importance to it. Only 1989, William Barthlott, in the meantime professor at the University of Bonn, took up the old discovery again and examinee the phenomenon together with his graduate student Christoph Neinhuis in the detail. The two succeed in not only decoding the "Lotos effect" in its meaning for biology, but also in transferring its dirt-deflecting principle at the same time to an artificial surface.

1996 Barthlott and Neinhuis demonstrated their procedure, which they meanwhile registered to be patented.

American Air Force major Jack E. Steele influenced the bionics in the year 1958.

After today's understanding the bionics concerns itself "with the technical conversion and use of constructions, procedures and design philosophies of biological systems". The internationally renowned saarbruecker zoologist Werner Nachtigall, influenced a simple formula, which expresses the substantial to the bionic aspect: " learning nature as suggestion for independent technical shapes".

The perfect, over millions and billions of years optimized, inventions of nature are a desired research object of chemists, engineers and architects today.