Yesterday I took a trip to the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, an oddity of a place containing all manner of weird and wonderful German technology, from a yard full of locomotives to an exhibition on cutlery and plates from railway dining cars. Unlike many science museums, the DTB doesn't have a whole lot of interactive exhibits – just a few push buttons here and there – but that doesn't mean it wasn't full of screaming kids on a Sunday.

What it does have, though, is an amazing collection of historical German camera gear. The exhibit is full of retro gadgets, as you'll see below, but the most interesting to me were the bisected lenses and cameras, the insides of which show the precision of a CAD drawing. Read on to see sawn-off gadgets, the origin of digital cameras and a secret doorway just for horses.

This is a lens from Leitz, made for Leica rangefinder cameras. You can see the lens elements, which look a little rough due to having been sliced in half. The amazing thing here, though, is the mechanical wizardry going on inside. This lens is from the thirties (or so my badly scribbled notes tell me), and contains an astounding amount of intricate machining, more akin to a watch than a lens. While there were no modern versions on display, I would expect that a Leica lens looks much the same today.

Here's another. Bigger and simpler. I think this is an SLR lens.

One more, and I think it's another Leica (the font on the ƒ-stop scale looks familiar). Check out the huge block of glass second from the top: It's a wonder any light gets through to the film.

This exhibit shows lots of manly long lenses, and – with the shots of footballers in the background – the glass was almost steaming up with testosterone. I'm not sure which one I like best. In terms of utility, I'd pick the third from the right, which looks like it would double as a handy bludgeoning tool if I were ever caught snapping through my neighbor's window.

The last internal shot, this one shows the leaf shutter for a 1932 Voigtlander Bessa. Instead of the focal plane shutter we're used to these days, the leaf shutter is actually inside the lens. They don't give such high speeds as a focal plane shutter, but they have one big advantage: Because they open all the way up, you can use a flash at any speed.

This is Agfa's ePhoto 1280, an early attempt at a digicam. The camera, made in 1997, shows just how far we have come in a decade. These are the specifications, cribbed from the excellent DP Review: 0.7 Megapixels (1024 x 768), maximum 1/500 sec shutter speed, ƒ2.8 maximum aperture (actually better than a lot of cameras today), a 38-114 mm (3x) zoom and a 2" LCD. The 1280 (the name I think comes from the maximum interpolated resolution of interpolated: 1280 x 960 pixels) shipped with a SmartMedia memory card boasting a huge 4 Megabytes. I guess some things haven't changed.

Lastly, this is the door at the end of the corridor. "Stairs for Horses." WTF? I tried the door and it was locked, so we'll never get to meet the equine gadget-fiends that might use this exclusive entrance.

Museum page [DTMB]