Deutsches Museum

The Deutsches Museum possesses over 100 000 objects from the fields of science and technology. The large number of valuable original exhibits makes the Deutsches Museum one of the most important museums of science and technology anywhere in the world. The collections are not restricted to any specialized range of topics: they include objects from mining to atomic physics, from the Altamira cave to a magnified model of a human cell. They extend from the Stone Age to the present time. Collecting historically significant objects is still one of the Museum’s central tasks, so that the stock is constantly growing.

About a quarter of the objects are on exhibition – in the main museum on the island in the river, at the transport museum on the Theresienhöhe, in the hangar at Schleißheim airfield, and in the Deutsches Museum Bonn. These illustrate important developments in science and technology, right down to current research.

Among the particular highlights (besides many others!) are the first motorized aircraft built by the Wright brothers, the U1 submarine, the first program-controlled computer (Conrad Zuse’s Z3), and Diesel’s original engine on the island; the first motorcar by Karl Benz in the transport museum; the Douglas DC3 at Schleißheim; and the first Fischer wall plug in Bonn.

A brochure entitled Masterworks from the Deutsches Museum presents a few of these outstanding inventions. You can find out more about them here under Selected Objects.

We are also currently showing a synopsis of some of the objects from the fields of transport, power machinery, and machine tools.