History Moving HistoryIngenious inventions, rare exhibits, and great plans for the future—that’s how one could sum up what awaits visitors to the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The museum, which just celebrated its one hundredth birthday, holds one of the most important collections on science and technology in the world.By Helge Bendl; Photos by Christoph Seelbach

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halls that crisscross under the building andother storage depots located throughout thecity. What might they be saying? Maybethey’re squabbling over which is the fairest ofthem all? (As far as the 2,000 recently deliv-ered slide rules are concerned, that could bea difficult question to answer.) Perhaps youcan hear the cars bickering jealouslyamongst themselves about why a particularsports car has been granted the honor ofmoving to a new location. Where might thatbe? Why, the new transportation center, ofcourse. Its first section, Mobility and Tech-nology, just opened this May. And which carwould that be? Why, a Porsche, of course. APorsche 911S from 1967, to be more exact.“The shine of the stainless steel body has not diminished, even after seven years and154,000 kilometers,” the curator wrote whenthe car entered the museum’s collections in

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have to walk nearly twenty kilometers (12.5miles). We’ve made things a little easier foryou and picked out some of the highlights forour virtual tour.

In this fascinating museum, you can de-scend into the depths of a coal mine or ex-plore the mysteries of outer space. You canwalk into a huge model of a human cell andsee how modern drugs work in the body. Anexact replica—the first of its kind—of theroof of the famous Altamira cave in Spaingives you a glimpse of mysterious rock paint-ings created tens of thousands of years ago.There are loads of interesting sound effects,too—the grand piano resounding in the hallof musical instruments, flashes of lightningexploding in the high-voltage demonstration,foghorns moaning, and radio hams search-ing for signals from afar. Some 1.3 millionvisitors come here every year, and all dis-

Avisitor walking through the Deutsches Museum is con-fronted with signs of genius everywhere. There is

Werner Siemens’ dynamo, which heralded the era of in-expensive electricity. Nearby is an inconspicuous boxwith a funnel—the telephone invented by Philipp Reis.Over here, there’s the calculator devised by JohannChristoph Schuster in 1792; over there, Konrad Zuse’sZ3 and Z4, the first programmable automatic calcula-tors. In one hall you can admire early steam engines andthe first motors developed by Otto and Diesel. Anotherhall showcases one of the Wright brothers’ early air-planes from a century ago.

The Deutsches Museum in Munich is truly a must foranyone interested in science and technology. In morethan fifty departments, this treasure trove harbors over18,000 exhibits. If you took just a minute to look at each one, it would take you almost two weeks and you’d

cover something to captivate their interests.Aviation buffs will find the trip out of the cityproper to the Schleissheim aircraft plantworth their while. Here, at Germany’s oldestairport, they can drool over planes spanningthe entire history of flying.

In addition to the many items on display,over 60,000 devices, machines, instru-ments, and models lie in storage, waiting fortheir turn in the spotlight. The museum staffdocuments each object with a quasi-“biogra-phy.” Indeed, some staffers treat the muse-um’s historical treasures with the respectthat is normally only accorded very impor-tant people. Thus it seems only natural thatsome of the exhibits appear to have taken ona life of their own, much like the magical ob-jects in fairy tales and legends.

With a bit of imagination, you might evenhear them whispering, deep down in the long

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The body beautiful: Get a grip on the inner workings of the human body

Kid-friendly: The hands-on exhibits help kids learn for life, not just for school

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And of course, it goes without saying thatthis section would not be complete withoutthe granddaddy of all automobiles, KarlBenz’s motor car, which was presciently de-scribed by a contemporary as “a tricyclewith a great future.”

Ingenious inventions and odd contrap-tions are not the only things on display atDeutsches Museum. The museum’s archivesare home to countless original documentsleft to the august institution by inventors andscientists. Stacks and stacks of gray card-board boxes bear witness to this fact. Oneof my favorites is a book on alchemy from1780. With its smeared and faded ink andcryptic abbreviations, it at first seems to re-sist divulging its secrets. However, after abit of reading I do learn what sorcerers need-ed to create a homunculus, an artificial hu-man, namely two parts women’s blood toone part men’s blood.

Rare manuscripts, drawings, and draftsslumber here; the oldest, such as the Alber-

the 1970s—a perfect example of the use ofstainless steel in constructing automobiles.

Supposedly (talk has it) the Porsche hasalready made friends with the odd-lookingTropfenwagen (teardrop car) invented by en-gineer Edmund Rumpler in 1921. This wasthe first car to be constructed with aerody-namic principles in mind. As a matter of fact,this masterpiece of streamlined design wasso far ahead of its time that modern cars on-ly recently have managed to surpass its sen-sational drag coefficient of 0.28.

The motto “The Joy of Movement” forgesa link between a number of seemingly dis-parate objects exhibited together in the new transportation center. They include iceskates made of bone from the early MiddleAges, a nineteenth-century “wooden horse”(a precursor of the modern bicycle; riderspushed their feet against the ground to pro-pel the vehicle forward and maintain theirbalance), a children’s pedal car, and a mod-ern carving ski of titanium, among others.

tus Magnus Codex, are from the Middle Ages. Naturally,there are also original drafts and drawings from Ferdi-nand Porsche’s engineering office here. Dr. Porschesupported the idea of a museum for technology and be-came a member of the museum’s board in 1938. Today,the archives encompass a staggering 4,500 yards ofbookshelves. Here lies the notebook in which Otto Hahnwrote the seemingly endless columns of numbers thateventually led to his discovery of nuclear fission. It is al-so home to Otto Lilienthal’s seminal construction sketch-es for flying machines and gliders.

A few feet away, there is the notebook Georg SimonOhm used to jot down his fundamental Law of Resis-tance. On thin squared stationery, Albert Einstein wroteof the “endless effort and agonizing doubts” he experi-enced in his work on gravity and relativity. Over theyears, numerous Nobel Prize winners have donated their

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Traffic intersection:Time flies at the Museum—onschedule, of course. Timeless,however, the shining body of the1967 911 S (below)

asserting that the sun is the center of ourplanetary system. Old botanical tomes singthe praises of the potato, recently discov-ered in the Americas. With more than900,000 volumes, this is the world’s largestlibrary specializing in the history of scienceand technology. The reading rooms areopen to scientists, amateur researchers,students—indeed, to anyone who is inter-ested—seven days a week.

One floor above the library is the office ofthe museum’s director, Wolf Peter Fehlham-mer. Asked how he would summarize theguiding principle for the museum’s next one-hundred years (and beyond), Fehlhammersays simply: “Looking back on history andforward to the future,” and “we have alwaystried to combine scientific accuracy with clar-ity and make the basic principles of scienceand technology come alive for our visitors inan exciting and easily accessible manner.”This holds true for all the museum’s attrac-tions, such as the new Center of Trans-portation, which will eventually occupy threeformer fair buildings and is slated for com-pletion by 2005. Or the soon-to-be-opened

medals and certificates to the museum. A faded imageof the old city center of Munich from 1839 is presum-ably the oldest surviving photograph in Germany.There’s no doubt about it—this treasure trove may nothold gold or jewels, but its contents are priceless nev-ertheless.

Not all the papers here are faded with age, though.Some of the newer additions include documents chart-ing the development of cells. Thus, information on keytechnologies of the twenty-first century has its placehere too—presumably for eternity.

Massive steel doors guard the way to the collectionof rare books, where more gems await to delight a sci-ence lover’s heart. Here, you can read how visionariesin the late sixteenth century dreamed up such improba-ble things as paddle steamers, suspension bridges, andparachutes centuries before they were invented. Or howCopernicus shook the prevailing worldview to its core by

“Center for New Technologies,” which willhelp visitors gain a better understanding ofbio- and nano-technology as well as geneticengineering. And especially for the “Kids’Kingdom,” for the youngest scientists.That’s just as the museum’s founder, Oskarvon Miller, would have wanted it. After all, heonce said the Deutsches Museum should be“entertaining, popular, and educational.”

A stop at the museum’s workshops,where elaborate experiments are preparedand miniature models are fashioned withpainstaking attention to detail, gives yousome idea of what an enormous amount ofeffort goes into fulfilling that promise. Aclimb up the museum’s sixty-five-meter tow-er is another good way to round off a visithere. A single, now-famous presentation wasthe sole reason the tower was built so high.It houses the original pendulum with whichFrench physicist Foucault demonstrated therotation of the earth in his 1851 experiment.

The tower is the perfect place to relaxand gain a little perspective on things whilepondering the truly fascinating phenomenonof how the earth moves under our feet. �

Gateway to health: The entryway into the pharmacy area leads into the world of medicine

Additional Information

The Deutsches Museum just celebrated its one-hundredth birthday in mid-May with a flying displayand a big parade. For the occasion, Museum Director Wolf Peter Fehlhammer wrote a copiouslyillustrated anniversary volume, which has been

A journey back in time: A favorite at the Museum is the bicycle collection

published by Prestel Verlag in German and in English: Deutsches Museum. Ingenious Inventionsand Masterpieces of Science and Technology.For further information, contact: DeutschesMuseum, Museumsinsel 1, 80538 Munich,Germany. Phone: +49-89-2179-1, fax: +49-89-2179-324; www.deutsches-museum.de.