about

The museum dynamically preserves and exhibits historical machine tools that contributed to the development of Japanese industry since the early Meiji period.

Museum Overview

his museum was founded on campus to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Nippon Institute of Technology in 1987.
The museum is open to the public.
The museum consists of a main hall, a steam locomotive hall and an annex, and displays more than 400 items ranging from small to large machines and equipment. The collection includes about 300 machine tools and others that especially contributed to the development of industries in Japan, which are displayed according to model and in the order of manufacture year. The museum features the unique approach of preserving 70% of the machine tools in working condition and presenting old machine shops restored to their ordinal state. We also preserve a gas turbine developed in a national project and a historical steam locomotive made in the UK at the end of the 19th century. This locomotive, which had been used in the Japanese National Railways for many years, is now maintained ready-to-operate and run at times in the museum.
The museum aims to help more people recognize the importance of Monozukuri, that is, advanced technologies for creating products and spirit that have been driving the development of Japan, and to educate the next generation of engineers. To this goal, we continue to expand the collection with historical machines and materials and elaborate the display and description.
Many visitors also enjoy our annual events including a special exhibition and lecture focused on common industrial products as well as demonstrations to operate the steam locomotive.

Message from the Director

Nippon Institute of Technology's guiding principle is practical engineering education, and its educational goal is to nurture practical engineers who can work closely with people in the real world and make multifaceted contributions to society. To achieve this goal, the museum was established on the campus in 1987 to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Institute. The purpose of establishing the museum was to preserve and make use of the machine tools used for educational purposes at the Institute and in the industrial world, as they were being discarded at the time of renewal and could be used in the teaching of manufacturing. In 2017, the museum celebrated its 30th anniversary. Since its establishment, continuous collection and preservation activities have grown into the museum where over 400 industrial products of great and small historical value that contributed to the development of Japanese industrial technology are exibited.The museum is used by people both inside and outside the Institute. The museum's exhibition facilities include the Main Building, the Steam Locomotive(SL Building), an outdoor exhibition area displaying a Hakone Tozan Railway train, and a machine tool library.
The Museum is operated on three major concepts.

The first is to make it an industrial museum that focuses on machine tools. Machine tools are the machines that create the all machines we use in our daily lives, such as trains, cars, and home appliances. With machine tools as the core of the museum, we exhibit a steam locomotive, turbines for power generation, and many other historically valuable industrial products producdeproduced by machine tools. Through these exhibits, you can look back on the history of various industrial products and realize the significant contribution of machine tools to industrial development, as well as their indispensable role of in our daily lives. You will also be able to see would also understand that a wide variety of machine tools are necessary to produce these various industrial products.

Secondly, our aim is to create a machine tool museum unlike any other in the world. To accomplish this, we have collected and preserved around 270 machine tools of great historical value of which about 70% are in dynamic preservation so that they can be actually put into operation and shown to visitors. We have restored not only individual machines but also old town factories to show how they actually operated. In addition, we have created a library dedicated to machine tools where visitors can learn abG6out the fundamentals and essence of machine tools as well as research and study their historical and technological evolution.

By learning about actual machine tools of high historical value together with many historical documents, you can understand the basic structure, movements, and principles of machine tools, as well as their fundamental machining functions. A chronological display of the machine tools also highlights the technological transition from the past to the present. Through the tour, you can experience the wisdom and ingenuity of our predecessors, who were able to achieve movements similar to those of today's state-of-the-art machine tools using only mechanical controls.

The third concept of the museum is for basic activities to be carried out through industry-academia collaboration. A Museum Supporters Association was established to achieve this aim, and in addition to its individual members, the Association has the support of many manufacturing-related companies, including machine tool manufacturers as corporate members. The Association implements various projects such as special exhibitions, lectures, human resource development, and research studies.
As you can see, the museum has many features and attractions that cannot be found elsewhere. We hope that as many people as possible will make full use of what the museum has to offer and that the exhibition can help create a better and deeper understanding of machine tools. Please come and feel the greatness and fascination of machine tools to learn about the past, understand the present, and think about the future of industrial technology. We sincerely look forward to your visit.

Shinji Shimizu, Director, Museum of Industrial Technology, Nippon Institute of Technology

Museum Staff:

• Director Shinji Shimizu
• Deputy Director Shinichi Ninomiya
• Keisaku Hirayanagi
• Hiroki Saotome
• Curator Yoshihiro Uehara
• Mikiko Futamata
• Shouichi Shimizu
• Tsutomu Komori