This year, the first exhibitions of the jubilant NTM will open

Prague - The National Technical Museum in Prague at Letná (NTM) will commemorate its hundred years of existence at the end of the week, although behind closed doors. Due to renovations that began in 2003, having been closed to visitors since 2006, it will remain closed for most of this year and will gradually open its attractive exhibitions to the public over the next two years.
    "The building's occupancy permit is planned for the summer, followed by the setup of exhibitions and the gradual opening of the museum," said NTM General Director Horymír Kubíček to ČTK. The aim is to restore the building in the spirit of the original vision of architect Milan Babuška from the 1930s. The exhibition areas will increase by 2500 square meters. The removal of older modifications will create four new large exhibition halls, each nearly 600 square meters. Two smaller halls on the ground floor and in the basement will serve temporary exhibitions. For the first time, there will be exhibitions on printing and architecture, construction, and design. Significant modernization will occur in the transport hall, as well as in the ore and coal mines, and the exhibitions of astronomy and photographic and film technology will be expanded.
    The museum commemorates the anniversary with the issuance of a commemorative silver 200 koruna coin and a special series of stamps. Occasional publications will also be released. For example, an illustrated catalog of 150 three-dimensional and archival treasures from the museum's collections is being prepared. Among these will be Bürgi's sextant, scientific instruments from the era of Rudolf II, Lumière's cinematographic device, the first car manufactured in the Czech lands, the Präsident, and the Benz-Victoria, the first factory-produced car that operated in our territory. As for the archival documents, there will be architectural plans and drawings by Josef Schulze, Josef Zítka, Josef Kotěra, and Josef Gočár. More than twenty experts working in the museum are contributing to the text portions. The catalog will also be published in an English version.
    The hundred-year history will be presented in an elaborate pictorial book by Jan Hozák and Jan Králík titled "The Story of the National Technical Museum," which will map its development and transformations. Scientific staff and curators of the collections are the authors of 25 expert studies collected in a two-volume anthology. Several texts will focus on transportation - for example, a text by Karel Zeithammer about steam locomotives from the Plzeň Škodovka or an article by Arnošt Nezmeškal about the first racing motorcycles by Jawa.
    In the autumn, NTM will be one of the organizers of an international scientific seminar on the heritage of three-color photography, which will be accompanied by two exhibitions; one of them will take place at the National Museum of Photography in Jindřichův Hradec. Throughout next year, an exhibition will be made accessible to visitors to celebrate the museum's centenary. It will offer authentic documents, photographs, archival items, and three-dimensional exhibits. It will reveal the fates of some collection items and the paths by which they were included in the collections.
    According to Kubíček, the new exhibitions will interest even visitors without a deeper interest in technology. For example, in the hall "Technique in Everyday Life," they will find all possible and impossible technical aids in the household from the last 150 years. In the popular transport hall, visitors will no longer see some stalwarts. Primarily selected exhibits from the railway collection, which are intended for the museum being built at Masaryk Station. The vacated space will be occupied by cars and airplanes that have been stored in depots.
    Currently, the National Technical Museum cares for 50,000 inventory units, 135,000 archival items, and 250,000 books from the fields of engineering, construction, mining, and electrical engineering.
    The Technical Museum of the Kingdom of Bohemia was founded on July 5, 1908. The purpose of the founding meeting was to draw attention to the significant contribution of the Czech lands to technical and cultural progress. The intention succeeded, and on September 28, 1910, the museum located in the Schwarzenberg Palace in Hradčany was opened to the public. The building at Letná designated for the museum was constructed between 1938 and 1942. During the war, it was occupied by the German occupation administration. The collections were moved to Invalidovna in Karlín, where makeshift exhibitions were created in unsuitable premises, open in the autumn of 1942. After the war, they were moved to Letná, where, however, two-thirds of the building were occupied by other institutions. Thus, the reconstruction also means a return to the original architectural layout.