Engines of change
Founded by electrical engineer Oskar von Miller in 1903, the Deutsches Museum opened its permanent building on an island in the Isar River in 1925. Today, it is the world's largest museum of science and technology, with a collection of over 125,000 objects. The main museum on the Museumsinsel (Museum Island) contains famous machines that redefined transportation and power.
One of these is the first functional diesel engine, developed by Rudolf Diesel. After an early test resulted in an explosion on August 10, 1893, Diesel perfected his design. The prototype on display, built between 1896 and 1897, achieved a 26 percent efficiency rating, twice the efficiency of steam engines it would soon replace.
Nearby is the Benz Patent-Motorwagen from 1886, the first automobile patented with a gasoline-powered engine. Engineer Karl Benz, a cyclist, used bicycle components from the Adler company to construct the lightweight three-wheeled vehicle. Its power came from a high-speed, single-cylinder, four-stroke engine that used petroleum ether as fuel. Benz received German patent number 37435 for this invention.
The dawn of the atomic age
The museum's chemistry collection holds the simple wooden laboratory bench and original equipment used to achieve the first nuclear fission in December 1938. The experiment was conducted by Otto Hahn and his assistant Fritz Strassmann. Their collaborator, physicist Lise Meitner, had fled Germany months earlier due to her Jewish heritage but continued to correspond with Hahn about the work.
Hahn and Strassmann were bombarding uranium with slow neutrons, expecting to create heavier, transuranic elements. Instead, their radiochemical analysis consistently detected barium, an element much lighter than uranium. Hahn described these perplexing results in a letter to Meitner. While in Sweden, Meitner and her nephew, Otto Frisch, correctly interpreted the data: the uranium nucleus had split into smaller parts. Frisch coined the term "fission" for this process. The discovery, made on this unassuming table, changed physics and the direction of world history.