Monday, July 09, 2007
The Deutsches Museum: A Brief Glimpse
This afternoon, the Schiller Center organized a trip to the Deutsches Museum. Despite the miserable rain, which my teacher assures me is not normal weather for Bavaria in the summer, I decided to tag along. So what if I had already visited their archives last week? I hadn't gotten a chance to see the actual museum displays. And besides, this would be a good chance to learn a reliable public transit route from the center of town, since the tram stop right by the museum is closed. Since I could not find a sign-up sheet in the Center's main lobby, I had assumed that no sign-up or payment were necessary.
I was wrong on both counts. Fortunately, they were able to squeeze me into the tour group of 30+ people, none of whom shared a common language beyond German. This was fine with our EXTREMELY ENTHUSIASTIC TOUR GUIDE, who took us on a whirlwind ride through the museum's aeronautics, ship building, and electricity exhibits as well as its justifiably famous walk-through coal mine.
Some highlights from the visit:
1. God can be found all around you. Even in the coat check room.
No kidding! One of the first things one sees upon entering the Deutsches Museum, assuming that you want to check your bags, is this sculpture depicting a rather traditional version of the Supreme Being creating the universe. Yes, that is a quote from Genesis underneath his heavenly perch. While this was, as far as I could tell, the sole direct reference to religion in the museum and seems to have been intended as a contrast to the other hundreds of exhibits, it still seemed somewhat out of place.
2. The Father of the Modern Science Museum?
I have a professor who hates it when people use the phrase, "The Father of _________" to describe someone. While I agree that the expression has become rather hackneyed from overuse and that it is altogether impossible to sire an abstract concept. Nevertheless, I do not feel that the expression is entirely out of place in this context. Because without Oskar von Miller there would be no Deutsches Museum. Von Miller was the driving force behind the museum's creation, and as its first director he organized Germany's politicians and industrialists to support the endeavor and secured cooperation from the local government in Munich, thereby allowing this new facility for science education to be established. Since most of America's modern (i.e. 20th century) science and technology museums based their design at least in part on the Deutsches Museum, von Miller is, if not the father of the modern museum, an incontestably important figure in the history of modern museology.
3. Umberto's Favorite Exhibit
Yes, it's time yet again for everyone's favorite means of demonstrating the rotation of the earth: the Foucault Pendulum. The Deutsches Museum pendulum is suspended inside the main tower, and hangs from a cable almost 60 meters long which apparently has the ability to disappear in digital photographs. (It's there...but very faint!) Like similar demonstrations I had seen in the United States, the pendulum is surrounded by pins which it knocks down as the Earth rotates beneath it. Unlike in America, it is not completely surrounded, win the pins only marking off a 90 degree arc rather than a full circle. I understand the logic behind the decision; ideally, between the time the pendulum is started swinging at 9 in the morning and the museum's closing time at 5, all of the pins on that arc will be knocked down. I am curious, however, whether this setup is typical of European science museums and if so, why their American counterparts tend to do things differently. Is it because Americans need to see the whole circle rather than an arc in order to appreciate the phenomenon being illustrated? Or is it because we just like knocking stuff down more? Questions to ponder...
4. That's Not a My-Boat, So It Must Be...
This is only a third or so of the U-1, the first submarine constructed for the German Imperial Navy. It went into service in 1906 and later served as a training vessel. By the end of World War I, it had to be put up in mothballs. Between 1921 and 1923, the entire submarine was disassembled, loaded on to trains and transported to Munich where the Deutsches Museum was putting the finishing touches on its new building. Although you can't walk through this particular U-Boat like you can with its descendant in Chicago, it still is a fascinating historical artifact.
5. Agricola in Action
Until I started studying the history of science, I had never heard of Georg Bauer, a.k.a. Georgius Agricola. I suppose most of you haven't either. It's understandable, but unfortunate, because Agricola was an interesting character in the history of early modern science, thanks to his contributions to the development of mineralogy and mining technology. In his book, De Re Metallica (which can be viewed in its entirety here), he presented a comprehensive account of mining operations during the mid-16th century, along with a slew of interesting diagrams for machinery that did everything from pump water to provide better underground ventilation. The image above is a full size reconstruction of one of Agricola's water pumps located in the Deutsches Museum's walkthrough coal mine. As my EXTREMELY ENTHUSIASTIC tour guide explains what's going on, two of my fellow Schiller Center classmates are acting as the power source to drive this machine, running along the wheel like a pair of giant hamsters. After a few moments, their efforts are rewarded as the buckets pictured below come up from the ground filled with water drawn from the Isar River outside!
This is just another example of what makes the Deutsches Museum so unique and exciting to visit. Because, let's face it, there are other science museums with walkthrough exhibits. There are even other science museums with walkthrough coal mine exhibits, most notably in Chicago. But I would be willing to wager that there are very few science museums outside Munich that include fully functional pieces of machinery based upon diagrams found in classic Renaissance texts!
6. A Shocking Conclusion
While we were leaving the mining exhibit, our EXTREMELY ENTHUSIASTIC guide asked a few of us what we did when we weren't studying German in Munich. When I explained my interest in science museums , she became even more EXTREMELY ENTHUSIASTIC and decided that after dropping off the rest of the group for a demonstration in the electricity wing, she would take me on a special detour to quickly see a few other exhibits. Thus I ended up getting dragged along by an EXTREMELY ENTHUSIASTIC tour guide, who it turns out LOVES MUSEUMS and explained to me in rapidfire German how great it was that I was able to do research in Munich and how wonderful the Deutsches Museum was. I tried my best to keep up, both physically and conversationally, but in both cases it proved a challenge. I think we saw the room devoted to the history of the Deutsches Museum proper, but not much else before she abruptly (BUT WITH EXTREME ENTHUSIASM) ended the tour, wished me luck, and pointed me towards the electricity demonstration...already in progress.
The show reminded me somewhat of similar electricity demonstrations popularized in Boston and Philadelphia, complete with Van de Graaf generators, Tesla coils, and Jacob's Ladders (the spark gap kind, not the wooden toy). But there were some interesting variations. For example, the demonstrators used a spherical Faraday cage that could be raised about twenty feet off the ground rather than settle for a permanent fixture on the stage. In addition, they demonstrated the importance of using a lightning rod using wooden models, one of which was grounded properly and one of which promptly became a smoking pile of kindling.
I was rather impressed with the whole thing and decided to capture the occasion on my camera using its video function:
The video I've uploaded here (my first ever YouTube upload, by the way), shows a particularly ferocious looking Jacob's Ladder doing its thing. The whole affair was quite impressive, though due to dim lighting, difficult to capture any details beyond the sparks.
After watching the show, I rushed over to the museum's library to sift through a few more documents before adjourning for the afternoon. Frustratingly, I still had not gotten my bearings so far as public transportation was concerned and ended up wandering north from the river in search of the Isartor train station but ending up instead at the Viktualienmarkt, the city's most famous open-air market. I took the chance to buy some fresh fruit for dinner as I wandered north to the nearby Stachus station to catch a trolley home, exhausted from the journey but excited that even after seeing all of these exhibits in the Deutsches Museum, I had only barely scratched the surface. There will still be a lot of exciting things for me to see. I only hope I have the time...
This afternoon, the Schiller Center organized a trip to the Deutsches Museum. Despite the miserable rain, which my teacher assures me is not normal weather for Bavaria in the summer, I decided to tag along. So what if I had already visited their archives last week? I hadn't gotten a chance to see the actual museum displays. And besides, this would be a good chance to learn a reliable public transit route from the center of town, since the tram stop right by the museum is closed. Since I could not find a sign-up sheet in the Center's main lobby, I had assumed that no sign-up or payment were necessary.
I was wrong on both counts. Fortunately, they were able to squeeze me into the tour group of 30+ people, none of whom shared a common language beyond German. This was fine with our EXTREMELY ENTHUSIASTIC TOUR GUIDE, who took us on a whirlwind ride through the museum's aeronautics, ship building, and electricity exhibits as well as its justifiably famous walk-through coal mine.
Some highlights from the visit:
1. God can be found all around you. Even in the coat check room.
No kidding! One of the first things one sees upon entering the Deutsches Museum, assuming that you want to check your bags, is this sculpture depicting a rather traditional version of the Supreme Being creating the universe. Yes, that is a quote from Genesis underneath his heavenly perch. While this was, as far as I could tell, the sole direct reference to religion in the museum and seems to have been intended as a contrast to the other hundreds of exhibits, it still seemed somewhat out of place.
2. The Father of the Modern Science Museum?
I have a professor who hates it when people use the phrase, "The Father of _________" to describe someone. While I agree that the expression has become rather hackneyed from overuse and that it is altogether impossible to sire an abstract concept. Nevertheless, I do not feel that the expression is entirely out of place in this context. Because without Oskar von Miller there would be no Deutsches Museum. Von Miller was the driving force behind the museum's creation, and as its first director he organized Germany's politicians and industrialists to support the endeavor and secured cooperation from the local government in Munich, thereby allowing this new facility for science education to be established. Since most of America's modern (i.e. 20th century) science and technology museums based their design at least in part on the Deutsches Museum, von Miller is, if not the father of the modern museum, an incontestably important figure in the history of modern museology.
3. Umberto's Favorite Exhibit
Yes, it's time yet again for everyone's favorite means of demonstrating the rotation of the earth: the Foucault Pendulum. The Deutsches Museum pendulum is suspended inside the main tower, and hangs from a cable almost 60 meters long which apparently has the ability to disappear in digital photographs. (It's there...but very faint!) Like similar demonstrations I had seen in the United States, the pendulum is surrounded by pins which it knocks down as the Earth rotates beneath it. Unlike in America, it is not completely surrounded, win the pins only marking off a 90 degree arc rather than a full circle. I understand the logic behind the decision; ideally, between the time the pendulum is started swinging at 9 in the morning and the museum's closing time at 5, all of the pins on that arc will be knocked down. I am curious, however, whether this setup is typical of European science museums and if so, why their American counterparts tend to do things differently. Is it because Americans need to see the whole circle rather than an arc in order to appreciate the phenomenon being illustrated? Or is it because we just like knocking stuff down more? Questions to ponder...
4. That's Not a My-Boat, So It Must Be...
This is only a third or so of the U-1, the first submarine constructed for the German Imperial Navy. It went into service in 1906 and later served as a training vessel. By the end of World War I, it had to be put up in mothballs. Between 1921 and 1923, the entire submarine was disassembled, loaded on to trains and transported to Munich where the Deutsches Museum was putting the finishing touches on its new building. Although you can't walk through this particular U-Boat like you can with its descendant in Chicago, it still is a fascinating historical artifact.
5. Agricola in Action
Until I started studying the history of science, I had never heard of Georg Bauer, a.k.a. Georgius Agricola. I suppose most of you haven't either. It's understandable, but unfortunate, because Agricola was an interesting character in the history of early modern science, thanks to his contributions to the development of mineralogy and mining technology. In his book, De Re Metallica (which can be viewed in its entirety here), he presented a comprehensive account of mining operations during the mid-16th century, along with a slew of interesting diagrams for machinery that did everything from pump water to provide better underground ventilation. The image above is a full size reconstruction of one of Agricola's water pumps located in the Deutsches Museum's walkthrough coal mine. As my EXTREMELY ENTHUSIASTIC tour guide explains what's going on, two of my fellow Schiller Center classmates are acting as the power source to drive this machine, running along the wheel like a pair of giant hamsters. After a few moments, their efforts are rewarded as the buckets pictured below come up from the ground filled with water drawn from the Isar River outside!
This is just another example of what makes the Deutsches Museum so unique and exciting to visit. Because, let's face it, there are other science museums with walkthrough exhibits. There are even other science museums with walkthrough coal mine exhibits, most notably in Chicago. But I would be willing to wager that there are very few science museums outside Munich that include fully functional pieces of machinery based upon diagrams found in classic Renaissance texts!
6. A Shocking Conclusion
While we were leaving the mining exhibit, our EXTREMELY ENTHUSIASTIC guide asked a few of us what we did when we weren't studying German in Munich. When I explained my interest in science museums , she became even more EXTREMELY ENTHUSIASTIC and decided that after dropping off the rest of the group for a demonstration in the electricity wing, she would take me on a special detour to quickly see a few other exhibits. Thus I ended up getting dragged along by an EXTREMELY ENTHUSIASTIC tour guide, who it turns out LOVES MUSEUMS and explained to me in rapidfire German how great it was that I was able to do research in Munich and how wonderful the Deutsches Museum was. I tried my best to keep up, both physically and conversationally, but in both cases it proved a challenge. I think we saw the room devoted to the history of the Deutsches Museum proper, but not much else before she abruptly (BUT WITH EXTREME ENTHUSIASM) ended the tour, wished me luck, and pointed me towards the electricity demonstration...already in progress.
The show reminded me somewhat of similar electricity demonstrations popularized in Boston and Philadelphia, complete with Van de Graaf generators, Tesla coils, and Jacob's Ladders (the spark gap kind, not the wooden toy). But there were some interesting variations. For example, the demonstrators used a spherical Faraday cage that could be raised about twenty feet off the ground rather than settle for a permanent fixture on the stage. In addition, they demonstrated the importance of using a lightning rod using wooden models, one of which was grounded properly and one of which promptly became a smoking pile of kindling.
I was rather impressed with the whole thing and decided to capture the occasion on my camera using its video function:
The video I've uploaded here (my first ever YouTube upload, by the way), shows a particularly ferocious looking Jacob's Ladder doing its thing. The whole affair was quite impressive, though due to dim lighting, difficult to capture any details beyond the sparks.
After watching the show, I rushed over to the museum's library to sift through a few more documents before adjourning for the afternoon. Frustratingly, I still had not gotten my bearings so far as public transportation was concerned and ended up wandering north from the river in search of the Isartor train station but ending up instead at the Viktualienmarkt, the city's most famous open-air market. I took the chance to buy some fresh fruit for dinner as I wandered north to the nearby Stachus station to catch a trolley home, exhausted from the journey but excited that even after seeing all of these exhibits in the Deutsches Museum, I had only barely scratched the surface. There will still be a lot of exciting things for me to see. I only hope I have the time...
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