April 15th; Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany

After a quick breakfast at the corner cafe next to our pension, we boarded a subway in the direction of the Isar River, where we crossed a bridge to get to the Deutsches Museum (German Museum) on the eastern bank. The museum had been strongly recommended by my brother-in-law Gustl, and he typically gives sound advice so that was on our "must see" list for Munich. It turned out to be a large building with four floors chock full of scientific and technical stuff that I found absolutely absorbing, and at 7 Euro apiece (Retiree Rate) it was a definite bargain. What I found most unusual is that many of the exhibits were not screened off like they typically are in U.S. museums; I could literally poke my nose into the innards of the stuff and touch and feel it to ascertain things like the composition, orientation, and functioning of all the parts.

Our first two hours in the museum were spent in the section devoted to ships. The entire history of ships was delineated from the dugouts of prehistory to the galleys of the ancient world and up to the great liners of the 1950s. In particular, the transition from sail to steam power was detailed by two full sized ships sitting in the middle of the hall: an 1890s sail powered fishing boat and a steam powered tugboat from the 1920s. In the sailing ship you could see the details of the wooden hull construction, sails, and sailing tackle whereas in the the tugboat you could see details of the steel hull construction, triple expansion steam engine, and coal bunkers for fuel. It was amazing that this revolution in ships had occurred in only 30 years.

Even more examples of small boats were exhibited including Irish curraughs, canoes, and rowboats of all kinds.

Among the rowing boats Monika even found an example of the original "Foldbot" that her mother and father had used to take Ausflugs during the 1920s. Monika's mother described taking one bag with pieces of the boat's frame and another bag with the folded skin on a train out of Hamburg to some stream where they would assemble the boat and paddle all the way back to town. We read the thorough description of the development of the Foldbot and learned that the inventor had carefully kept the size of all the pieces of the interior frame so that the bag would fit into the overhead compartments on German railroads, which ensured that the entire boat would be considered "hand luggage" and carried at no extra charge! The wooden seats inside the Foldboat looked extremely rudimentary and it was hard to imagine two adults squeezing in there, but we have, as they say, the pictures to prove that Monika's parents did it. Her folks even had a small sail for their Foldbot that they could apparently use when the wind was right to save some paddling.

It was quite all right to have artifacts from Monika's parent's time on display, but I was much less pleased to have artifacts from my own history on display. Am I so old that my stuff is in a museum? Of course not! The first thing I found from my past was my Moeck tenor recorder that I found in the music section. It was spooky seeing my recorder there, but I passed it off as a karmic quirk. Pretty much every major group of musical instruments was represented in the displays (except for banjos!), and we made a special point to photograph the oboe section for my sister Lois.

A complete room was dedicated to old harpsichords, pianos, and organs, some of which were played by a docent while we were there. The museum obviously kept the old instruments in reasonably good tune and the selections she played sounded quite nice. For pianos, the progression of different mechanisms for actuating the hammers where described with small working models of each variant that would plunk out a single note. In general, by the way, the museum had many "hands on" exhibits like that.

A separate room displayed the progressive development of player pianos and other automatic methods of producing music. The docent obligingly operated several models to show how they worked. The oldest player piano, for example, used carved wooden boards with grooves and bumps to operate different keys, a method that reminded me of the wooden boards used to program weaving operations in the old Jacquard weaving looms. An early 1900s player grand piano used a paper roll, and Monika said it reminded her of the one her grandfather in Minsk, Belarus (then part of Russia), used to have. The piece de resistance, however, was a player piano combined with a set of automated violins. Besides the piano keys, the paper scroll also tilted three violins to come into contact with a rotating circular bow and push down on the appropriate strings to play the violin part. Ingenious!

But echoes from the past kept coming at me. I found my HP calculator in the scientific section (which calculator I still occasionally use), and I suppose my old slide rule would be even more of a museum piece than the calculator. Finally in the toy section I found the type of wooden blocks I had played with as a kid and the German equivalent of Erector Sets, and it hit me that I was old enough that a lot of the things I had owned, and not just my old junk cars, belonged in a museum. Hmmmmm.

Our next three hours in the museum were devoted, with a quick break for lunch, to the extensive aviation exhibits. Once again, the entire history of aviation from the Montgolfier balloon up through space flight were covered with great examples of the aircraft and detailed descriptions of each one. The nice thing about having lots of models and pictures of all the airships and dirigibles was that I could show Monika exactly the type of construction I intend to use on my airship. They even showed one of 700 cubic meters volume that was on the order of the size of airship that I think would make for a good recreational vehicle.

The main focus in the aviation section was, of course, the airplane, and examples of everything from Lillienthal's gliders up through jet aircraft was either sitting on the floor or hanging from the ceiling. German aircraft were heavily represented among which was the Rumpler 1910 aircraft that flew from Munich to Berlin to win the Katrina Prize. The Rumpler made it from one city to the other faster than the train could make it, thus proving the feasibility of aircraft for transportation. That line of aviation transportation was further developed by the Junkers company which produced commercial aircraft with cantilever metal wings and all-metal stressed-skin fuselages in the 1930s, which is the same basic construction now used on all airliners.

The aviation section also had great examples of German military aircraft of WWI and WWII, including a Fokker Triplane, a Messerschmidt 109 and 262, and the fearful rocketplane that I think was called the Komet. The Komet accelerated to around 1,000 kilometers per hour in a matter of seconds and could reach altitudes of around 30,000 feet in order to attack Allied bombers, but after the rocket fuel ran out you had exactly one chance to land what was essentially a flying brick on nothing more than a skid beneath the fuselage. Added to that, the hydrogen peroxide rocket fuel was so unstable that if anything at all went wrong, the aircraft simply exploded like a bomb. The text said that of the first 18 Komets flown, 16 ended in fatal accidents, and I just hated to think of those brave young men essentially throwing their lives away in something as dangerous as that.

Aviation evolved into space flight, which had a whole set of exhibits on the top floor plus a real German A-4 (V-2) rocket from WWII standing in a 4-story tall stairwell. Since I had learned a lot about the A-4 when we visited Peenemuende during Wanderung 2, I didn't spend too much time with it, but I was surprised to learn that besides the 1600 A-4s launched at London there were 1200 launched at Antwerp. I had never heard about that, and I had to wonder why Antwerp of all places?

The rest of the space flight exhibits were, thank goodness, peaceful and very informative. I saw great examples of rocket motors, satellites, spacesuits, and even the European space research lab. It was particularly nice to see examples of the Russian space suits and stuff alongside the American stuff so that I could carefully compare them (these were behind glass so I couldn't really touch and feel them). A fully functional satellite weather station was working on the 4th floor along with a docent who could and would clarify any of the displays.

As we approached the witching hour of 5 p.m., we worked our way back toward the entrance through a great toy section. Apparently, the idea of kids building things was kicked off by the German educator named Froedel who developed Kindergartens in the 1830s. He thought it helped children develop somehow, and I'm not sure what the research shows on that score but I do know that these sets are a lot of fun! The building sets transitioned from sets of tiny real stone blocks to wooden blocks to plastic blocks to interlocking plastic blocks like the Legos we know and love today. Each room of the exhibit had some of the original construction sets plus absolutely fantastic examples of what could be built from them. I mean there were airplanes, cars, Ferris wheels, churches, and all kinds of other things in those rooms. My fingers where twitching and I had the same feeling that those toys were itching to be played with that I had in the toy museum in the town of Seiffen in the Erzgebirge during Wanderung 2.

Our final few minutes in the museum before they kicked us out was spent in a curious reconstruction of one of the famous caves in Spain that has prehistoric human paintings. The exhibit is quite dim, mimicking the original cave, and the paintings on the ceiling are accurate reconstructions, but since the original cave has been closed for conservation this was the only way to see those prehistoric paintings. Fortunately since they were reconstructions I could take pictures of them and not feel guilty.

By the time we staggered out the door of the Deutsches Museum we had been on our feet for more than seven hours and had a whale of a time. We highly recommend that museum for anyone interested in things technical, but be forewarned that if you push every activation button and read all the English translations and actually touch and think about the things you are seeing, you will be there for days. Our feet were so tired by this time that we just limped to the nearest streetcar stop and took a Number 17 streetcar back toward the Marienplatz. Monika had, as it turned out, forgotten to bring a pair of gloves and we spent the next hour shopping for those (unsuccessfully) and for some classic German movies on DVDs (successfully). We walked slowly home, stopping at a couple of food stores to buy grapes, rolls, luncheon meat, sliced cheese, and, of course, Easter chocolate which was conveniently on a 1/2 price sale! After our evening snack we just put our feet up while lying in bed; I worked on the journal and Monika made plans for the next day's touring until it was time to go to bed.