A "Mastery Unapproached": Robert Wichard Pohl's (1884–1976) Teaching Environment for Experimental Physics

An almost ideal context for a case study on the development, use, and reception of multimodal material educational settings can be found in the works of Göttingen physicist Robert Wichard Pohl (1884–1976). From 1919 on, Pohl created an educational programme for introductory lectures on experimental physics, in which he demonstrated fundamental concepts and phenomena using simple yet meaningful experiments that were projected on the front wall of the lecture hall. With his teaching aids, technical infrastructure, and textbook, Pohl changed the teaching of physics at schools and universities in Germany and beyond. Pohl’s original devices are still part of the teaching collection used during introductory physics lectures. I will argue that teaching collections, as the material foundations for such “regimes of practices”, should be treated not as passive archives of objects but as dynamic, complex environments that allow new insights into the history of science teaching.