The Deutsches Museum (which means German Museum) in Munich, is the world’s largest museum of science and technology, with approximately 1.5 million visitors per year and about 28,000 exhibited objects from 50 fields of science and technology.
The museum was founded on June 28, 1903, at a meeting of the Association of German Engineers (VDI) as an initiative of Oskar von Miller. A few months before the 1903 meeting of the Society of German Engineers, Oskar von Miller gathered a small group who supported his desire to found a science and technology museum. In a showing of support this group spontaneously donated 260,000 marks to the cause and elected a “Provisional Committee” to get the ball rolling. Its official name is Deutsches Museum von Meisterwerken der Naturwissenschaft und Technik (English: German Museum of Masterpieces of Science and Technology). It is the largest museum in Munich.
The main site of the Deutsches Museum is a small island in the Isar river, which had been used for rafting wood since the Middle Ages. The island did not have any buildings before 1772 because it was regularly flooded prior to the building of the Sylvensteinspeicher.
In 1772 the Isar barracks were built on the island and, after the flooding of 1899, the buildings were rebuilt with flood protection. In 1903 the city council announced that they would donate the island for the newly built Deutsches Museum. The island formerly known as Kohleninsel (coal island) was then renamed Museumsinsel (museum island). In addition to the main site on the Museumsinsel, the museum has two branches in and near Munich and one in Bonn. The Flugwerft Schleißheim branch (aviation museum) is located some 18 kilometres north of Munich’s city centre close to Schleißheim Palace. It is based on the premises of one of the first military airbases in Germany founded just before World War I. It comprises the old air control and command centre as well as modern buildings added in the late 2000s after strong endorsement from Franz-Josef Strauss, the then prime minister of the state of Bavaria, who was a passionate flyer.
[caption id="attachment_195555" align="aligncenter" width="437"] The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 December 1948[/caption][responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a historic document that was ad...
