Oskar von Miller

Who was Oskar von Miller?

Oskar von Miller was a German engineer and founder of the Deutsches Museum, a large museum of technology and science.

Born in Munich into an Upper Bavarian family from Aichach, he was the son of the first supervisor of the royal ore foundry in Munich, Ferdinand von Miller and his wife Anna Pösl. Miller married the painter Marie Seitz in 1884, with whom he had seven children, two of whom, however, died in infancy. His brother was the ore caster and director of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts Baron Ferdinand von Miller. With the elevation of his father Ferdinand into the Bavarian nobility on 12 October 1875 and with the inscription of the family name on the roll of the aristocracy of the Kingdom of Bavaria on 30 December 1875, Oskar was simultaneously ennobled.

Miller decided to study technology and the building industry. Soon he discovered the recently developed field of electrotechnology, and so turned to it. In 1882 he organized the first electrotechnical exhibition in Germany, after having been fascinated by the first exhibition of this kind in Paris. At this exhibition, on 16 September 1882, in partnership with Marcel Deprez, he succeeded in transmitting an electric current for the first time over a distance of approximately 60 kilometers, from Miesbach to the Glaspalast in Munich.