A nasty Christmas surprise lurked in the letter box of Hans Bernoulli, an adjunct professor of urban design at ETH Zurich, on 24 December 1938. The President of the Swiss School Board had written to inform him that his lectureship was to end with the conclusion of the winter
History
Exhibition “Comets in Counter Space”
In collaboration with ETH Library’s Image Archive, the exhibition venue Counter Space in Zurich presents a three-part, associative image and sound project based on the historical genre of the diaporama. The exhibition finds surprising ways to
Hangovers all round – first day at university, 1855
160 years ago, on 16 October 1855, 68 students embarked on their degrees at the newly found Federal Polytechnical School (now ETH Zurich). Naturally, the Swiss School Board decided to announce this in the newspapers all over Switzerland and even as far as Augsburg:
The Eiger Sanction – to mark Clint Eastwood’s eighty-fifth birthday
On Sunday, 31 May, Clint Eastwood celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday. To mark the occasion, we are displaying a number of photographs from the archive of the photographic agency Comet Photo AG, which were taken by B. Albrecht on the set of Eastwood’s The Eiger Sanction in
From the trenches of the First World War to the university lecture halls: war invalids and POW students at ETH Zurich
Switzerland must have seemed like paradise to him. After one and a half years in POW camp in Germany, Jean Chopin, a twenty-five-year-old French infantryman, was allowed to leave for neutral Switzerland in the spring of 1916. Finally, after an interruption of almost three years, he was able to take up his academic studies again in the autumn of 1917.
Ermordung eines Privatdozenten – Zum 25. Todestag von Hermann Burger (1942-1989)
Wolfram Schöllkopf, Privatdozent für Glaziologie und deutsche Literatur an der Eidgenössischen Technischen Universität, flieht aus der Sitzung der Freifächerfakultät, der Abteilung 13 für Geistes- und Militärwissenschaften.
In search of black gold – Swiss petroleum geologists and the nationalisation of crude oil in Iran
After the Second World War, in the early days of the Cold War, Iran gradually began to break away from the geopolitical power games and economic greed of the major powers, which had especially set their sights on Iranian crude oil. At the end of 1949, the Iranian government founded Iran Oil Co. (Sherkat Sahami Naft Iran), an autonomous state-owned company.
Albert Robida: Le Vingtième Siècle (Paris 1883)
Albert Robida (1848-1926) was a French writer, draughtsman, painter, caricaturist and journalist. He began his career as an illustrator for popular Parisian magazines such as Chronique illustrée and Le Pollichinelle. He became famous for his illustrations of luxury editions of literary works by François Rabelais, Charles Perrault, Honoré de Balzac and others. From 1879 onwards, Robida published a
“Hallelujah!” – Albert Einstein’s cry of joy on 2nd February 1912
Undoubtedly, the exclamation was an expression of Albert Einstein’s joy regarding his return to his alma mater. He had studied mathematics and physics at the Federal Polytechnic School (now ETH Zurich) from 1896 to 1900, where he obtained a teaching diploma. However, it is fair to speculate that his appointment as a full professor of theoretical physics also triggered a sense of
Internment camps in Switzerland
Around 50,000 French, Belgian and Polish soldiers and civilian refugees fleeing from the Wehrmacht crossed the Swiss border in Neuchatel Jura in June 1940. They were disarmed and detained in camps. The map detail depicts the internment camps on 3 July 1940. The French