The centenary volume of Munich's Deutsches Museum, Ingenious Inventions and Masterpieces of Science and Technology, is a celebration of the long and often troubled history of one of the world's oldest, and largest, technology museums.

The Deutsches Museum was founded in 1903 by Oskar von Miller, a pioneer of electrical engineering. Work on its permanent home — an architectural jewel on an island in the Isar river, which flows through Munich — was begun in 1906, but its completion was delayed first by war and then by hyper-inflation. The building was finally opened in 1925 with great fanfare in a celebration that is sometimes referred to as the Weimar Republic's last party.

A few happy years followed before history struck again. The Nazis didn't like von Miller's cosmopolitan aspirations for the museum, and the Allied forces' bombs had no pity, destroying much of the building as well as around 20,000 display items. But the museum survived and remains one of the world's most significant technology museums.

This coffee-table book, edited by the museum's director, Wolf Peter Fehlhammer, includes illustrations of treasures from the past along with current exhibitions. These range from Otto von Guericke's first vacuum pump and hemispheres, forged in 1663, to the 1962 recreation of the Altamira cave with its Stone Age paintings, to the Helios space probes, solar observatories constructed in Munich and launched in the 1970s. The illustration shows a timepiece dating from 1630 from southern Germany, one of the earliest instruments for measuring time.