Attempting to fly across the river Danube on 31 May 1811, Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger, commonly known as “The Tailor of Ulm”, crashed his hang-glider, much to the amusement of his audience including the duke and princes. Today, we know he was a visionary. A world without boundaries where the powers of imagination and science intersect will be explored at the Stadthaus by set designers Timo Dentler and Okarina Peter. There is a lot to discover for everyone, preschool children, teenagers, retirees, nerds and astrophysicists.
Attempting to fly across the river Danube on 31 May 1811, Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger crashes his hang-glider, much to the amusement of his audience, including the duke and princes. Today, we know that he was a visionary.
Mumbai 1895: The Indian Sanskrit-scholar Shivkar Bāpuji Talpade dreams of sending an unmanned flying apparatus towards the skies. He wants to send it 1500 feet into the air. It worked, according to reports of the time. This is four years before the Wright brothers started building the (alleged) first flying apparatus of the western world.
In 1910, Henri Coandă discovers the so-called Coandă effect. During the first test-flight of his Coandă-1910, the first jet-engine powered plane in the world, he observed how gas and flames shooting out of the engine were hugging the fuselage, discovering what he called the Coandă-effect. Although the plane burns down to the steel frame, the development of a disk-shaped plane not even thirty years later is based on this effect! In 2004, just thirty years after Henri Coandă’s death, Romania names the international airport of Bucharest after the great inventor and aviation pioneer.Albert Einstein is working on a thought experiment regarding quantum mechanics, noticing a ‘spooky action at a distance’. Quantum teleportation is demonstrated for the first time by Anton Zeilinger in 1997. Teleportation? Trekkies would say: ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’
On 28 May 2014, Alexander Gerst enters low earth orbit for the first time en route to the international space station ISS. ‘Only gravity pulls me down a bit’, tweets Gerst six months later after returning back to earth.
Gerhard Schwehm has been waiting for many years for the German space probe to finally reach its orbit around 67P/Tschurjumow-Gerassimenko Rosetta in August 2014. Three months later, the ESA comet scientist provided commentary to a huge global audience during the touch-down of robotic lander Philae.
The first human to dig a tunnel straight down from the Minster square in Ulm will come out at Flowerpot Bay, Pitt Island. The tunnel will be 12,742 kilometres long and flying from end to end will take approximately 42 minutes. There are no boundaries where the powers of imagination and science intersect. Taking Flight to a World Beyond
Timo Dentler, born 1971 in Ulm, and Okarina Peter are working as stage and costume designers all around the world, predominantly for music theatre productions. Wolfgang Göbbel, who is responsible for the light design, was also born in Ulm, in 1953. Working for international festivals he has flown across the city boundaries long time ago.
Stadthaus Ulm: Die Welt, ein Raum mit Flügeln / On the 250th anniversary of Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger
15. Mai bis 25. Oktober 2020 / https://Stadthaus.ulm.de
Amazing details, daring inventions and a series of clues to the true stories behind the exhibition can be found on Facebook at #diewelteinraummitflügeln
