Knowledge – Rundetaarns historie

5 Apr, 2017

Crossing the Creek to Fetch Water

When looking downward, I gaze upward. This was how the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) described one of the allegorical sculptures that decorated his manor house Uraniborg on the island of Hven. But the words also fit Brahe himself. Uraniborg contained not only an observatory where he could follow the movements of the planets in the sky, but it was also the centre of a stringently designed garden, which among other things consisted of ingeniously landscaped flowerbeds, many of them in star-shaped patterns. Here Tycho Brahe cultivated herbs with which he could do chemical or alchemical experiments in Uraniborg’s basements....

Knowledge

17 Nov, 2016

Stone, Bronze, Iron

It was not just gold that was gleaming during the Danish Golden Age in the first half of the nineteenth century. More modest materials also got their chance to shine. They constituted the very foundation of the systematic organisation of the past that took place in the 1820s in the Library Hall accessible from the Round Tower. An organisation so precious that it underlies the system, which is still universally used today. It is the so-called three-age system whereby the human prehistory can be divided into periods named after the material predominantly used for the production of weapons and tools...

Knowledge

6 Sep, 2016

The Silver Lining

There is an old Danish saying that advices one never to go back to a dud. Nevertheless, this was exactly what the Danish second lieutenant Andreas Anton Frederik Schumacher (1782-1823), who came from Holstein, did on a September day in 1807. And the fact is that neither the military history, nor the history of science, nor the Round Tower’s history would have been the same if he had listened to the old advice. The dud he went back to was one or two of the so-called fire arrows that were shot over Copenhagen during the British bombardment of the city...

Knowledge

6 Jun, 2016

The Elements of Wind and Weather

Meteorology did not come into being in the Round Tower. As early as 340 BC the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote a treatise about the elements of wind and weather entitled Meteorologica, and at least since then, generation after generation has tried to understand, measure and predict the weather of exactly their location on earth. However, it was in the Round Tower that the systematic collection of meteorological data gathered momentum on Danish soil. It happened from 1751 when the astronomer Peder Horrebow the Younger (1728-1812) began to carry out several daily observations of the temperature and atmospheric pressure as well...