Germany day 37: München

September 25th: The hostel breakfast was uninspired, so I will spare you a boring photo. Main target for the day was the Deutsches Museum. It had a surprising number of technical exhibits on ships, planes, and electricity.

600V 500A (300 kW) mercury-vapor arc rectifier (AEG, 1936). This reminded me of Jeri Ellsworth, whose roller-derby moniker was The Rectifier. Anyway, this huge beast is the logical equivalent of one diode, albeit a high-power one.

Original 1879 Edison dynamo, shipped to Europe in 1881 for an exhibition in Paris. 110V 45A, so could power about 3 modern hair dryers if it wasn’t DC.

Very early 3-phase generator by Friedrich August Haselwander (1887). 110V, around 2.7 kW, 16 Hz. Things were moving amazingly quickly back then; multi-phase electricity was first conceived of in 1885 by Galileo Ferraris, 2 years later there were prototype generators in Europe (this one!) and America (by Charles S. Bradley), by 1888 Tesla and others had patented improved designs, and in 1891 we had the first 3-phase hydroelectric power station (Lauffen am Neckar, Frankfurt).

There was a large section on Informatics / Computer Science.

Arithmometer (first commercial calculating machine) by Charles-Xavier Thomas (Paris, 1845)

1962 reconstruction of the Zuse Z3 relay computer (1939-1941; original destroyed in 1944). First computer to use binary. 22-bit floating point.

Zuse Z4 (1942-1950). Still relays, but 32-bit floating point.

Electronic 5-digit-decimal multiplier, by W. Sprick & H. Schmidt (Kiel, 1949-51)

G1a magnetic drum computer, Max Planck Institute, Göttingen (L.F.B. Biermann, 1955-56), modified from the earlier G1 (1950-52). Control was by paper tape (no loops or branches).

back side of the G1a

Siemens 2002 (1960)

Telefunken TR 4 (1962)

IBM 7074 (1962)

IBM 360-20 (1967). Smallest/cheapest computer in the 360 series. First minicomputer with an operating system. First use of microprogramming (in ROM).

Kenbak-1 (1971). First personal computer. No microprocessor!

Apple I (1977)

3-rotor (1926?) and 4-rotor (1944) Enigma machines

We needed a lunch break, so walked across the river.

“some weird vegetarian restaurant” – Carol

Back side of the museum. Note the TWO observatories.

Trautonium (1931), early electronic synthesizer. Emulated traditional instruments. Paul Hindemith encouraged its development and wrote a concertino for it. The score for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) used an updated version of it for both music and bird sounds.

Fonosynth (1960-62?), Italian synthesizer

Left, MiniMoog (~1979) … like I have at home. 🙂 Right, early modular Moog (1960s?), below pictures of the Beatles using one in 1969.

Giant (50 cm diameter) photomultiplier tube by Hamamatsu. The Super-Kamiokande experiment uses 11,200 of these at a cost of about $3,000 each, for a total cost of around $33M. In 2001, over half of the tubes imploded and had to be replaced. (For comparison, my experiment will use one 7.5 cm diameter PMT costing about $85.)

Fokker Dr I triplane, similar to what was flown by the Red Baron.

We found a simple dinner of potato pancakes.

Carol got applesauce and beer, while I got the Lachs with sour cream.

Then we walked around town a little.

I’m a sucker for a good tiling. Just wait till the Alhambra.