Up at 06:30, some technical issues with the WiFi, a little bit more diary and into breakfast 07:35 – these buffet style breakfasts always seem to take so long as one goes backwards and forwards to organise the plate and the coffee and the forgotten utensils – then on the U6 (five minutes away) to Hallisches Tor. Walked along the main road by the canal rather than change to the U1 for one stop, though it wasn't quite as pleasant and isolated as I thought it might be, to arrive at the Deutsches Technikmuseum (German Museum of Technology) at 09:30.
Berlin's answer to London's Science Museum, the Technikmuseum started life as a transport museum but has since expanded into other areas. And it shows: the two original engine sheds are crammed with huge steam locomotives and reconstructions of the way the different classes used to travel, in a variety of rolling stock, spanning a large chunk of the history of the railways. The large New Building has well-presented displays over several open floors covering German aviation and shipping.
But the Computing section was quite restricted (reflecting the relatively small German computing industry perhaps), though it claims the world's first programmable computer, Konrad Zuse's Z1 from 1938, a floating-point binary mechanical calculator which read instructions from a perforated 35mm film; a late 1980s reconstruction, built by Zuse himself with a small team, is on display. Apparently the original never worked well due to a lack of mechanical precision.
There is a small section on print – not a patch on the specialist Museum of Printing in Liepzig of course – and on papermaking, and I was particularly interested in the collection of sometimes weird and wonderful typewriters. The large Photography section is excellent, but I felt the dimly-lit film and cinema display on the top floor was rather dry. Whatever any shortcomings, it's a huge museum and it was difficult to do it justice in a few hours. I came out feeling somewhat overloaded with information and images at 13:45, after four and a quarter hours, and I hadn't even tried to look at Road Transport in its nearby but separate building.
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