The story of Deutsches Museum

The main site of the Deutsches Museum stands on an island in the Isar that was once called Kohleninsel, coal island. It had been used for rafting wood since the Middle Ages, and it had no buildings before 1772 because it flooded regularly.

In 1903 the city council announced it would donate the island to the new museum, founded on 28 June 1903 at a meeting of the Association of German Engineers on the initiative of Oskar von Miller, the engineer who built the first high voltage line from Miesbach to Munich in 1882. His early supporters spontaneously donated 260,000 marks. Today it is the world's largest museum of science and technology, with about 125,000 exhibited objects from 50 fields and about 1.5 million visitors a year.

For a time it even hosted pop and rock concerts by The Who, Jimi Hendrix and Elton John. For more aircraft, head to the Flugwerft Schleißheim branch, some 18 kilometres north of the city centre.