Trudelturm
Technical monument · Berlin
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Trudelturm is an egg-shaped, roughly 20-metre wind tunnel built between 1934 and 1936 by the German Aviation Research Institute at the former Johannisthal airfield. Inside it, aircraft models were filmed as they spun in mid-air, letting engineers study a plane's spin behaviour in a laboratory for the first time. The results fed into Luftwaffe fighter development. Listed as a monument, it now stands on Humboldt University's Adlershof campus.
From Wikipedia
The Trudelturm (English: "spin tower") is an approximately 20-meter-high former specialist wind tunnel in the Adlershof district of Berlin, Germany. The building, also known as the "Trudelwindkanal" ("spin wind tunnel"), was built by the German Aviation Research Institute (Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt, DVL) between 1934 and 1936 at the former Berlin-Johannisthal airfield. It stands next to the approximately 130-meter-long Großer Windkanal ("big wind tunnel") from the same period. Both are listed on the Berlin State Monuments List as part of the former DVL site. When it was built, the tower represented a technical innovation that for the first time made it possible to simulate the dangerous condition of aircraft spin in the laboratory. The experiments helped to better understand the complex processes involved in spinning. For example, it was determined how to intercept and regain control of aircraft "lurching" toward the earth without a pilot. A (precisely manufactured) model could be inserted into a vertical (bottom-up) airflow in such a way that it always flew at the height of the observation facility and could be filmed by high-speed cameras. The speed of the airflow could...