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The History of the Department
1898
Ludwig Prandtl obtains his degree in mechanical
engineering at the Munich Technical University. He
then works as an assistant to August Föppl, who
was to become his father-in-law later. However, in
1899, he had to submit his thesis on ‘Occurrences of
Tilting. A Case of Unstable Elastic Equilibrium’ to the
LMU (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität) in Munich. He
made important contributions to a basic understand-
ing of fluid mechanics and developed the boundary
layer theory.
Name of the Department
Over the past 150 years, the present-day Department of
Mechanical Engineering has had various names. In 1868
the department’s history begins as ‘Mechanical-Technical
Department’. Around the year 1900 its name changes to
‘Mechanical Engineers Department’. In the 1930s it is called
‘Department of Mechanical Engineering’, and in the 1940s
‘Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering’. In
1974 the Electrical Engineering section becomes a department
in its own right while the Department of Mechanical
Engineering remains. A reconstruction of the exact dates
– apart from the last renaming in 1974 – is not possible.
Transitions were fluid each time the name changed, and the
old and new names of the department were used in parallel
over many years.
Hilde Barkhausen (1876–1967), a member of the research staff at the Laboratory for Technical Physics, and colleagues. In the front row, to her right,
is her sponsor, Professor Oscar Knoblauch, around 1908.
Ca. 1900
Around 1,000 students attend courses at the
Department of Mechanical Engineers.
1901
The Munich Technical University is granted the right
to confer doctorates and is thus put on a par with
Munich University.
This was preceded by complicated negotiations
with both the Bavarian and Prussian Ministries of
Education. It was the universities in particular which
feared a debasement of the doctoral degree and
voiced harsh protests in the run-up to the decision.
1902
Carl von Linde returns to the Munich Technical Uni-
versity as associate professor of Applied Thermo-
dynamics. It is on his initiative that the Laboratory
for Technical Physics is set up.
Ludwig Burmester begins his lectures on kine-
matics at the Technische Hochschule, making the
theory of the wheel gear an important part of the
curriculum.