A walk through German industry and Technology
Visiting Deutsche Technikmuseum in Berlin
The Deutsche Technikmuseum in Berlin, or German museum of technology was very highly recommended when looking for destinations in the capital. The first Sunday of each month is called Museum Sunday, where museum entry is free. As you can imagine, it turned out to be more crowded than usual in the exhibits but it’s good that there’s so many people interested in science and technology!
Comprised of several older buildings and a newer annex, the museum was quite large and can easily take up 2-4 hours of visiting time. I’d just like to highlight a few sections of the museum that I found exceptionally cool.
Planes
If you’re an aircraft enthusiast then you’re in for a treat. Planes are suspended from the ceiling casually in the atrium and spread out on the top floor of the museum for anyone to have a look up close.
Plane hanging from the ceiling. Probably Bücker Bü 131B Jungmann, Swiss Air Force.
Floor with more planes!
Optics and Photography
The museum also hosted a collection of items illustrating the history of photography.
Camera lenses/ objectives and with some sliced open cross sectionally. Behind there are some portraits of famous physicists e.g. Ernst Abbe.
Old wooden camera apparatus?
They also had an exhibit on holography (invented by Gabor, a Hungarian-British physicist who also worked at Imperial). A hologram, different from a photograph, is a 3D recording of a wavefront, as shown in the image below. You should be able to see parallax in the image!
Movie showing the parallax effect, when viewed at different angles, of a hologram that was fabricated by lasers.
Printing and Typography
A part of the exhibition also had an introduction on paper making, printing and typography.
Exhibit on typography and making individual characters.
Writing and print is arguably one of the world’s greatest inventions as it first enabled the widespread transmission of ideas beyond the living voice.
Fancy print machine with Eagle as a decorative feature on top.
Newer machine capable of tracing geometric patterns on paper.