Today, September 3, I visited the truly amazying Deutsches Museum. I had heard that one needs three days to see this world famous collection of exhibits, but all I had was one afternoon. It seems that taking in all the exhibits would set a person well on the road to becoming an engineer of one sort or another.
The Mining exhibit was my starting place. I learned that flint was the first mineral that human beings searched for and utilized. First flint was simply picked up on the surface of the earth, then searched for by digging pits. The earliest tools were Stone Age products, stone hammers on twisted vines. Then pick axes were used. It was fascinating to take in the development of mining, to see the depictions and models of the various types of boring into the earth. I walked through numerous mines, all very real. They were terrible places to work! Dark, dirty, wet, poorly ventilted places. The life of any miner must have been a short one. Hammers, picks, chisels and muscle were the means used to break through rock to find the particular mineral bearing ore. Not until the middle of the twentieth century did miners have semi decent working conditions. And the development of machinery!!! Now miners had earth goughing machines, grinding wheels, three layers of them, each a meter in diameter.
That is the special thing about the Deutsches Museum. Anyone can see the developent of technology in various fields of human endeavor. So I discovered the technological development of printing, film and movie making, the earliest computers, to the Remington Rand computer built in 1949. It weighed tons, had 5,600 vacuum tubes and 18,000 diodes, and sold for a million dollars. How much did you pay for your laptop?
I also enjoyed seeing the development of Marine navagation, Aeronautics and Astronomy. I was not ready to leave at closing time, 17:00, and I tried to see one more exhibit after I picked up my knapsack at the cloakroom. But the guard turned off the light in the Electricl power room and I was compelled to leave the wonderful Deutsches Museum.
