A Blast to the Past | Michael Rodehorst

Entrance to the Deutsches Museum Verkehrszentrum

This morning, E3 ventured out to one of Germany’s three Deutsches Museums. The branch that we visited is named the Verkehrszentrum, which translates to traffic center. This wonderful museum houses some of transportation’s oldest and most influential artifacts ever invented in terms of locomotion and automotives. For example, three of the oldest model steam locomotive hulls reside in this museum, and, although they are replicas simply because the originals no longer exist, it was still exciting to see how the old hulls looked in comparison to today’s modern trains. Also, we got to see Karl Benz’s car which was the first automobile to be gasoline powered. This one cylinder, 2-stroke engine was very simplistic but incredibly revolutionary at the time. It had three wheels, one seat, and included a lot of what seemed like bicycle technology.

The tour of the museum was just as incredibly informative as it was visually intriguing. We learned a lot about the economics of transportation and the adaptations and modifications to reduce emissions. Interestingly, the reason that manually shifting cars are preferred in Germany as opposed to automatic shifting cars is obviously because they are cheaper, but there is much more to this reason than just the price of the car. Germans have to pay steep fuel taxes when they fill their cars up, so fuel consumption is always a major concern. Automatic cars waste a lot of gas when the engine shifts between gears while manual cars waste little to no gas at all when shifting. Therefore, manual cars are preferred because they use less gas which, in turn, saves money at the gas pump. We also learned about other important ideas and concepts like why ethanol is used in gas and how much can be mixed in with the gas. Ethanol is a safe and efficient additive to gasoline due to the fact that it combusts to give off gases that do not harm the atmosphere, and it is much cheaper than

gasoline. Because of this, adding ethanol to gasoline reduces gas consumption; however, the amount of ethanol that a country can add to the gas it is selling is dependent on the amount of ethanol accessible. For small countries like Germany that have no room to expand, they cannot build extra farmlands to produce more and more ethanol. As a result of this, the gas that Germans buy at gas stations is a mixture containing only ten percent ethanol. The amount of ethanol accessible plays a role in how much will be added to gas. We learned about many more important issues and events in transportation history such as the growth of electric cars and possible upcoming of hydrogen cells, Henry Ford’s assembly line and revolution in the mass production of cars, and the introduction of catalytic converters to reduce emissions and put an end to acid rain issues. Overall, this museum was incredibly interesting and there was so much to look at and learn about. I never thought that transportation could be so enthralling, but the Verkehrszentrum Museum and our tour guide kept me captivated the entirety of the two-hour tour.