The Institute of Rock Structure and Mechanics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, is a legal successor of the Mining Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. The origin of this Institute can be dated as early as from the year l927, when the Institute for Scientific Research of Coal was founded. The founder and the first director of this Institute was Dr. Hans Tropsch, the co-author of the well-known Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. After 1948 this Institute was renamed: The State Institute of Fuel. The Mining Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences was established in 1958 by fusion of the departments separated from the State Institute of Fuel (processing, chemistry of caustobioliths, briquetting, and analytical chemistry and of the newly founded departments (geomechanics, mine ventilation, of hydraulics of underground waters and radioisotopes). It was characteristic of this Institute to solve particular actual problems in the fields of geosciences and of chemistry of mined minerals (namely coal) on the basis of a multidisciplinary approach and by synthesis of results.