Patents from the Age of Prussian Industrialization Revived

Abstract

Technical documents such as historical patents are important cultural assets and part of our cultural and historical heritage. The Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin is an archive with thousands of historic Prussian patents from the 19th century. These are examples of the beginning of the German industrialization. The documents cover patent drawings and descriptions as well as comments from the patent examiners. This paper is about first common activities of the Berlin state archive and the Technische Universität Ilmenau to make the documents available to a broad public. Aside from the digital reproduction and presentation of texts and images the activities focus on remodeling the technical devices and animation of models with WebGL in web browsers. In the created interactive animations different functional and constructive aspects can be explained to the viewers. The original content as well as the derived content like videos and interactive animations is finally made available in the open access portal Digital Mechanism and Gear Library (www.dmg-lib.org ). This paper describes the used work-flow and experiences showing selected examples.