Would Max Frisch have followed the Olympic Games in Rio if he were alive today? Some claim he took little interest in sport. Others say he absolutely loved it. Either way, a wide variety of physical activities featured in his life and work.
Humanities and Social Sciences
The Döttingen Ghost
After the Ghost of Kyburg Castle today it is the turn of another specter. Enter Döttingen Ghost, who seems to be far less notorious, than its crony from the Kyburg. Maybe the lack of publicity has to do with its having no castle to dwell in and its roaming the streets instead. For this is
“I, Hedwig Delpy” The first woman to complete a doctorate at ETH Zurich
No sooner had a new regulation enabling the Federal Polytechnic School (now ETH Zurich) to award doctorates come into force on 1 October 1909 than half a dozen applications were submitted. The final of these first six was from a woman.
The construction of the Gotthard railway – the southern access route to the Gotthard tunnel
Those who are allowed to make drawings for the Gotthard line here in the open air in 1875 should themselves lucky! The tunnel workers toiled in the often far too stuffy pits in the north and south. The construction company Favre allows this and numerous other
Freethinker dismissed – Hans Bernoulli on his 140th birthday
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
Of page-turning and wonder: Andy Warhol and the American magazine LIFE
There probably is nothing more mundane than idly flicking through a magazine on a Sunday afternoon. More often than not, fresh, grinning faces beam back at the reader as colourful page upon colourful page invites you to keep reading. That’s how it is today – and how it has been for ages.
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
A piece of the moon in Zurich – the lunar rock exhibition at ETH Zurich in 1970
„Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.“
With these words uttered by Neil Armstrong during the first moon landing on 20 June 1969, America pipped the Soviet Union to the post in the race to the moon at the height of the Cold War (Jaumann 2009, 36). The years that followed until the last moon landing in December 1972 were