Electropolis Museum

The Electropolis Museum in Mulhouse offers an interactive journey through the history of electricity, featuring over 12,000 items, including a 1901 Sulzer-BBC generator.

Planning your visit

Electropolis makes electricity physical rather than abstract, largely because of one object. The centrepiece is a Sulzer-BBC steam-driven generator from 1901, weighing 170 tonnes, which powered a Mulhouse textile mill for decades — and it is run several times a day in a staged demonstration with sound and light showing what industrial power actually looked and sounded like at the turn of the century. Nothing else in the collection conveys the scale of that transition as well.

Around it sit over 12,000 objects tracing electricity from early static experiments and Leyden jars through domestic electrification to modern generation, with interactive stations covering circuits, magnetism and energy. The domestic section — irons, radios, vacuum cleaners and lamps across a century — is quietly effective at showing how completely electricity rewrote ordinary life.

Mulhouse is an unusual museum town: this sits alongside the Cite de l'Automobile with its enormous Bugatti collection and the Cite du Train, France's national railway museum, all products of the region's industrial past. Combining two in a day is realistic.

The generator demonstrations are scheduled rather than continuous, so checking times on arrival shapes the visit. Allow around two hours. The main booking is an entry ticket. Current availability is listed below.