About the museum:
Founded along the lines of the existing great science and industry museums in the world, the Zagreb Technical Museum is of the universal type, that is, a complex museum of science and technology, unlike technical museums that deal with only a given area of technology. The technical museum in Zagreb was founded in 1954 and just four years after its founding it was allotted the space in Savska 18 where it still has its seat. The buildings of wooden urban architecture that were designed by the architect Marijan Haberle, originally meant for trade exhibitions, are today an important example of cultural property, and this is confirmed formally by their being inscribed in the list of protected cultural properties. The first departments of the museum, dealing with means of transport, mining and geology, with a model mine, were opened to the public in 1963. Then came departments of petroleum, astronautics with planetarium (1965), the Nikola Tesla Demonstration Laboratory (1976), the agriculture department (1981) and the firefighting department (1992). The permanent display of the museum has been enriched in recent years with other materials, for example, with the alley of sculptures of major figures of Croatian science and technology in the open air park (1993). The foundations of agriculture and the mining, geology and petroleum departments were expended in 1994 with model beehives – an apisarium and a cadastral office, and the energy transformation department with a collection of model machines called the Thermal Power of Fire (1999). As well as the 2,800 objects in the permanent display, there are another 10,000 objects in the museum’s stores. A small number of the objects are related to the collections of the permanent display, while a much larger number are from other areas. Use objects typical of the industrial civilisation of the 19th and 20th centuries have found a place for themselves in the collections and storerooms. Traditionally, a lot of attention is devoted in the museum to the visitors and to the popularisation of science and technology, as seen by the large number of organised and special guided tours and other activities. The Technical Museum is the reference museum in Croatia for science and technology museums, which increases its responsibility for the collection, renovation and presentation of the scientific and industrial heritage, with which the founding and equipping of restoration and preparation works are connected.
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