This book is all about events, discoveries and ideas which may have seemed small and insignificant at the time but later changed the world. DDT and LSD, Frick & Frack, the Basel Mission and the Zionist World Congress, Tadeus Reichstein and Friedrich Nietzsche, the first printed edition of the Koran and much else provide the stuff of which exciting stories are made in Basel, the hub of the universe.

Matthias Buschle (*1970) is an art historian, journalist and exhibition curator.
Daniel Hagmann (*1966) has a PhD in history and has been writing for many years on the cultural history of the Basel region.