NET RESULTS:The success of the Deutsches Museum highlights the strong need for an Irish equivalent to showcase our scientific and technological achievements, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON
THE DEUTSCHES Museum (www.deutsches- museum.de/en/), Germany’s expansive science and technology museum in Munich, is in John Graham-Cumming’s handy book for technophiles, The Geek Atlas, so there was no question that a visit to the city would demand a day set aside for its exploration.
Not just to cross it off the list – though some consider The Geek Atlas to be the techie equivalent of a field guide to birdwatchers, and delight in ticking off another conquest. But I’d heard several enthusiastic reports of this museum and was eager to see it.
The 47,000sq m (56,212sq yd) museum does not disappoint. That hundreds of other people, including a large army of children of all ages, felt the same, was apparent on arrival, with queues so long at the two entry cashiers that the museum has set up a third in a trailer in the entry courtyard.
But this isn’t a museum aimed significantly at children. And that’s a compliment and testimony to great museum design.The museum is aimed at adults, but kids have no problem being drawn into what are often quite complex exhibits.
In part that is because the museum is full of real things – wonderful things like ships and boats, cars and planes, engines and microscopes, computers, rockets and robots.
The first room on entry is full of an entire sailing ship, sails unfurled, built in the 1800s, cut away so that you can view the interior. There is an entire U-boat, also cut away. There is an Irish currach hanging on a wall and other sailing vessels from around the world.
Similarly, a vast floor upstairs is full of real planes and flying machines. Other rooms are packed with bits of early electronic generators. There are endless motors. The computing section – which was partly mothballed for renovations – had gadgets galore, including a fleet of calculating machines from across history as well as a 1950s vacuum tube-based early computer from computing pioneer Konrad Zuse.
The space exploration section has a collection of space suits, a moon rover, pieces of rocket engines, and detailed explanations of how rocket fuel combusts. One quintessentially German bit shows the kind of thing we really all want to know about: a commode on the international space station with an explanation of all the parts (oh, so that’s how they go in zero gravity!). And who knew that a plastic urine collector for the Apollo astronauts was a special area of manufacture for the giant white goods company Whirlpool (the kind of precise detail that delights at this museum)?
There are plenty of explanations and interactive exhibits to let visitors understand how things work, as well as live demonstrations that captivated children. But every item on display also has a detailed explanation (usually in English too), as well as – so German! – exact technical specifications. So while the kids might enjoy looking into the dozens of planes or cut-away car engines, an adult engineer would be in heaven for an hour or two, in these sections alone.
This is a museum that is full of real objects and takes an unapologetically strong engineering and hard science approach, rather than a highly simplified “how things work” view of science based on models or virtual exhibits. As a matter of fact, there are very few virtual, touchscreen-based exhibits at all, except in the fascinating section on nanotechnology, where they are well utilised.
It’s a serious argument for low tech. Too often, tech museums are full of interactive exhibits for kids that they mostly just bash around like toys with little interest in the content. And they are, annoyingly, so often not working in the first place.
Three things really stood out for me at the end of a too-short day at the Deutsches Museum, where whole sections had to be left unexplored, and that’s even without going to its two – two! – adjunct museums in Munich, one highlighting flight (I guess three floors at the main museum are not enough) and the other, land transport.
First, was how well the museum works in lively biographies of real, international scientists in every section, so that you never forget that behind every invention lie real people, with a passion for science.
Second – and connected – was how well a museum like this can showcase national capabilities in science, engineering and technology. Of course, Germany has a long history in engineering and technical innovation, but the way in which exhibits are designed must inspire many German kids to see such areas as exciting and inviting as a personal career.
Finally, it showed how desperately Ireland needs a proper science and technology museum and how it should not be something designed “for kids” but for everyone.
If Ireland wants and needs children to be inspired by research and innovation, to fall in love with working in science, engineering and technology, then it needs such places; but we all need to celebrate national and international scientific accomplishment, and to learn those great stories.
How ironic to go to Germany’s national museum (and how telling about attitudes to science here that a museum about science and engineering is simply called “The German Museum”) to learn about the Earl of Rosse’s pioneering 1845 telescope, or to discover in an exhibit about the wave energy-based Wells turbine that it is named for its inventor, Prof Alan Wells of Queens University.
Plans for a science museum have been repeatedly shelved by the Irish government. At the moment, Trinity College’s Science Gallery tackles the subject, but it is small and its thought-provoking, often quirky exhibits aren’t intended to have the role of a national science museum.
While we wait to see if a long-promised science and technology museum ever returns to the national agenda, I’d highly recommend a visit to the Deutsches Museum.
