Technikatörténeti szemle 23. (1997-98)

TANULMÁNYOK - Efmertová, Marcela: Major Anniversaries of Prague’s Czech Technical University and its Support from the Secondary School System in the Past

engineering, notably the construction of fortifications, geometry and surveying. Students could avail themselves of Willenberg's own library as well as instruments and technical models he himself constructed for that purpose. Each school year was concluded with a public examination or exercise. Students were expected to prove their konwledge of the individual subjects in the presence of state commissioners. The studies at the school which originally lasted two years were later prolonged to three years. There was a relatively lively interest in attending the school even though students were supposed to have passed at least two years at Prague University before entering the technical institute. Aristocratic families in particular hailed the opportunity of sending their sons to a technical school in Prague as they no longer had to seek private teachers for their offspring or pay for their costly studies abroad. The studies soon proved to be quite useful also for many bourgeois families, namely for their manufacturing and commercial activities. Willenberg's successor as the school's headmaster was Johann Ferdinand Schor

4 a native of the Tyrol. A painter and an engineer, educated in Italian schools, who settled in Prague in 1725, Schor proposed to provide both artistic and technical training. He was probably the last professor who still viewed arts and technology, painting and engineering as two sides of one coin. Schor paid special attention to mathematics, geometry, surveying and engineering drawing. In his lectures he explained the latest findings and discoveries in physics, optics, statics, hydrostatics, mechanics and hydraulics. The next stage of schooling was aimed at testing the practical application of the theoretical knowledge, namely construction of waterways and bridges as well as civil engineering. Foritifications and military architecture were the last subjects to be added. Schor, who wanted to educate civilian students in geography, history and heraldry, was not only a teacher at the Estates' institute. He pursued many other practical activities which were readily exploited by the Czech estates. He surveyed their land, carried out levelling of water surfaces, built machinery, designed waterways, and took part in constructing river navigaton projects etc. Thanks to these activities the school acquired, for the very first time, a distinctly practical pattern, aimed specifically at promoting the country's economic needs. The third distinguished professor who taught at the Estates' Technical Institute was the scientifically minded Franz Anton Linhart Herget

5 who graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy, studying physics and mathematics and, at Schor's technical school, virtually all the subjects taught there. Thanks to his great talent, in 1766 Herget was appointed Schor's assistant and, after the latter's death, in 1767 he was named, as a very young man of 26 years, a definitive professor at the school. Herget divided instruction of engineering sciences into three parts: the first section was devoted to mathematics and