National Technical Museum

The Narodni technicke muzeum occupies a functionalist building of 1938-1942 on Letna, and its central transport hall is the reason to come: a single space several storeys high with a glazed roof, in which locomotives, railway carriages, motor cars, motorcycles and aircraft are arranged on the floor, on balconies and hanging from the structure, so the whole history of Czech transport engineering is visible at once from a gallery. The collection is strong because this was an industrial country - Skoda, Tatra, Laurin and Klement, Praga, Aero, Avia and the Ringhoffer works all built here. Around the hall are further departments: astronomy, printing, photography, timekeeping, architecture, household technology and a reconstructed coal mine in the basement, walked as a route. The museum is old - founded in 1908 - and the collections reflect a century of acquisition.

History

The collections go back to the engineering school founded in Prague in 1717, the Prague Polytechnical Institute of 1806, and the Czech industrial museum that Vojtěch Náprstek founded in 1874. The museum itself was founded in 1908 and opened to the public in 1910 as the Technical Museum of Bohemia, in the Schwarzenberg Palace; it was renamed the Czechoslovak Technical Museum in 1918 and moved in 1942 into its present building beside Letná Park, a functionalist design by Milan Babuška, who had won the architectural competition. Three new galleries opened in 1995, a railway museum with about 100 vehicles followed in 2001, the floods of 2002 damaged some 200 cubic metres of documents kept outside the main building, and the museum was closed from September 2006 to February 2011 for extensive renovation (Wikipedia, National Technical Museum).

What's there

• One vast transport hall - locomotives, cars and aircraft on floors, balconies and wires.
• Czech industrial engineering - Skoda, Tatra, Praga, Aero and Ringhoffer represented.
• A mine in the basement - a reconstructed coal working, walked as a route.
• Departments around it - astronomy, printing, photography and timekeeping.

When to go

All year. A day.

Before you go

Closed Mondays and very busy in school holidays. The mine route is guided with limited places. Labelling is uneven across departments. The building is large - allow real time.

Nearby

Letna park and the Prague Castle approach are a short walk away.

Key facts