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Vacation 2016August 26, PotsdamScience Park "Albert Einstein" |
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Next to Brauhausberg (which is German for Brewery Hill) is Telegraph Hill, or Telegrafenberg in German, so named after a
Semaphore station that was installed there in 1832. The station was one of 62 Stations on a
340 miles-long optical telegraph line through Prussia (from Berlin to Koblenz). In the late 1800s, several scientific institutes were established on the hill, resulting in what is now called the Albert Einstein Science Park. |
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Main buildings in the Science Park are the Michelson House,
and the Helmert-House. Except for the Einstein-Tower, all the main buildings in the park were designed by Prussian architect Paul Emanuel Spieker. |
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The main building, now called the Michelson-House was built in 1879 for the Royal Observatory for Astrophysics. Here, in 1881,
Albert_A._Michelson carried out his measurements on the relative movement of the earth
against the hypothetical ether, the results of which laid the basis for Einstein’s theory of relativity. In 1889, a pendulum in the basement succeeded in recording a remote earthquake near Japan. Today, the building is part of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. |
In 1892, the Royal Prussian Geodesic Institute moved into a building, that was later named after its president
Friedrich Robert Helmert. Originally, the building was used for research on gravitation. Today, the building is part of the German Research Centre for Geosciences. This is where GFZ-1, Potsdam's first satellite, launched in 1995, was designed. The building also hosts the Science Park's scientific library. |
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One of the most popular buildings in the park is the Great Refractor. It
was built in 1899 and was one of the largest telescopes of its time.
Here, in 1904, Astronomer Johannes Franz Hartmann delivered the proof of the existence
of |
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The Telescope was taken out of commission in 1968 and the building soon started to deteriorate. In 1997, a foundation started raising money to rebuild it. In 2006 the completely restored building and its telescope were dedicated as technical monument. |
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Next to the Great Refractor is the Helmert-Tower, built in 1892 as part of the
geodesical-astronomical observatory. The tower was used for triangulation. Until 1950, it was Prussia's geodesic "Point Zero"- the reference point
for all German maps.
A monument of the first (East) German astronaut Sigmund Jähn and his
crew mate, soviet Cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky pays tribute to the fact, that the
first German
space mission was primarily an earth observation and mapping mission.
The inscription "Together on Earth and in Space" refers to the East-German/Soviet collaboration in space research.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxValery Bykovsky and Sigmund Jähn before takeoff in 1978 |
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At the end of this short tour was the Einstein Tower, considered one of the world's best
examples of expressionist architecture. The tower was designed by architect Erich Mendelsohn,
one of the most influential architects of the 20th century. It was built in 1921 to host a telescope used for experiments and observations to validate (or disprove) Albert Einstein's relativity theory. The tower It is still a working solar observatory today.
Albert Einstein at the tower in 1921 |
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Click the left turn sign to get back to Brausberg. Or click the right turn signal to move on to Berlin's Central Bus Station. |
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