Photo: Deutsches Museum
Collection of Plans
The architectural and engineering drawings collection forms the core and one of the oldest collections of the Deutsches Museum Archive. It offers a wide thematic scope, with relevant records available for almost every field of technology.
Photo: Deutsches Museum
Photo: Deutsches Museum
The Technician’s Language
Plans and technical drawings are a medium of visual communication, often described as the 'language' of the technician, engineer, and inventor. The technical drawings collection comprises approximately 120,000 sheets in total. Among the holdings are graphic depictions, engravings, notable original drawings, and sketches dating from the seventeenth century through to modern engineering designs. Twentieth-century sets of plans—including those from companies such as Messerschmitt and Junkers, as well as the Maschinenfabrik Esslingen—sometimes encompass several hundred sheets each. Well documented areas include mining and metallurgy, mechanical engineering, transport (particularly shipping, aviation, and railway engineering), and civil engineering (bridge and tunnel construction).
The holdings reach back well into pre-industrial and early industrial periods. Notable treasures include early metallurgical drawings dating from around 1700, as well as hand-coloured drawings by Joseph Lieberr and Josef Baader from the early nineteenth century. Regarded as a milestone and an enduring symbol of the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Germany is the original drawing of Alfred Krupp’s steam hammer 'Fritz'. Other pioneering historical documents of technical and industrial innovation, such as drawings by Wilhelm Bauer, Rudolf Diesel, and Otto Lilienthal, have since been reintegrated into their respective personal papers.