National Technical Museum (Národní technické muzeum)

Collections of the Emperor Rudolf II, who in addition to collecting art also collected various technical devices, some of which are exhibited here, can be considered an ancestor of today’s museum. The technical collections were also enriched by the Jesuits, who founded the Museum Mathematicum in 1722 and Vojta Náprstek, the founder of the Czech Industrial Museum in 1873 (the original intention of the museum had been to increase the level of technical education and information on technical innovations in the world, but later it focused more on ethnography).
At that time the General Land Jubilee Exhibition in 1891 was the largest exhibition of technical equipment and devices in our country. Exhibits remained there long after the exhibition had been closed and at that time the Committee of the Museum of inventions was created and attempted to get a permanent building for these exhibits. From 1907 there were discussions of building a technical museum in Prague. The Trading Chamber Exhibition held in 1908 introduced a number of other models of buildings, machines and technical equipment and an additional collection fund for the future museum. The impulse to gather collections was given by the Technical University professors and as early as in 1908 the foundation meeting of the Technical Museum of the Czech Kingdom, later Society of the Technical Museum, was held.
Thanks to the generosity of Prince Schwarzenberg current collections in Schwarzenberg Palace at Hradčandské Square were opened for public in 1910. There were exhibitions of the engineering, glass industry, water supply, aviation, textiles industry, sugar industry, geodesy, transport, architecture etc. here. In 1921, cash collections had been started for a new museum building, Prague City Hall had provided a land near the water tower in Letná and in 1935 an architectural competition for the joint construction of the buildings for the collections of the Technical and Agricultural Museums was declared. The project by architect prof. Milan Babuška had been chosen and the decision was made that both buildings would be separated by a new street.
The building has been constructed in the so called international style, which is a late stage of functionalism. For this style also the term individualistic functionalism is used. The museum building was built in the years 1938 - 1941. The building of the Technical Museum had an open U shape, whose base was the main facade towards Letná Park. Between the two shorter wings rushing out perpendicularly from the facade edges, there was a main hall measuring 70 x 25 m. Its height was 14 m and had three galleries. It was intended for the largest exhibits from the area of transportation, aircrafts, locomotives and cars.
The museum's collection includes over 50,000 units of inventory, of which about one tenth is exhibited. There are such unique items as astronomical instruments, with which Tycho de Brahe and Johannes Kepler worked, the first car made in this country, the oldest surviving Bugatti car, Viktor Kaplan testing turbine, horse-drawn fire engine from 1795, which extinguished the National Theatre fire, railway saloon car of Franz Joseph and T. G. Masaryk, famous Bleriot aircraft used by Jan Kašpar for his first flight from Pardubice to Prague or one of the oldest daguerreotype in the world. The collection of typewriters includes the smallest typewriter in the world, German Taurus, which has a dimension of pocket watch.
During the Nazi occupation the brand new building was occupied by the Ministry of Post and the Society of the Technical Museum Society had to vacate even the current premises in Schwarzenberg Palace. At that time the collections were stored temporarily in Invalidovna in Karlín, where one of the richest and oldest architectural collections in Europe has been actually deposited until now. A quarter million plans, projects, studies and two hundred comprehensive building funds, such as the complete plans of Jan Kotěra, Josef Gočár and Josef Zítek were inundated with water here during the disastrous flood in 2002. Only in 1990 various offices moved away from the museum building in Letná and thus the museum can use its entire building, registered in the State Register of Cultural Monuments.
Following the extensive reconstruction carried out from September 2006 under the supervision of Ing. Arch Zdeněk Žilka, the museum was inaugurated on 15 February 2011.