The museum - in its conception it is unique in the museum landscape of Germany - is dedicated to the intensive interaction of art and technology in the 19th century. Thematically interested in particular areas such as photography, the artistic and medical beautification of the human body, the romanticization and simultaneous industrialization of the Rhine, the strange juxtaposition of telepathy and telephony, but also the (re) discovery of Egypt in the 19th century or the park as green lung in the city - mentality history full of overlaps of art and technology. Many self-evident aspects of our everyday life go back to this ingenious century: in addition to photography and telephone the car, the railroad, the paper money, but also social "inventions" such as the nuclear family or compulsory education. In half-yearly changing theme exhibitions it becomes clear how up-to-date and how close the penultimate century is for us in many ways. The accompanying program to the exhibitions deepens with workshops for children, readings and lectures the living encounter with this century in which Humboldt and Napoleon, Marx and Rothschild, Nietzsche and Bismarck, Liebig and Daimler lived and worked.
