Tivadar Puskás
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Tivadar Puskás (17 September 1844 Pest - 16 March 1893 Budapest) was a Hungarian inventor, telephone pioneer, and inventor of the telephone exchange[citation needed]. He was also the founder of Telefon Hírmondó.
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[edit] Biography
The family of Tivadar Puskás was part of the Transylvanian nobility. Puskás studied law and later engineering sciences. After living in England and working for the Warnin Railway Construction Company he returned to Hungary. In 1873, on the occasion of the World Exhibition in Vienna, he founded the Puskás Travel Agency, the fourth-oldest in the world[citation needed] and the first travel agency in Central Europe.
After this, Puskás moved to Colorado and became a gold miner. It was while he was in America that Puskás exposed the American "energy machine" inventor Keley as a fraud.[citation needed]
Puskás was working on his idea for a telegraph exchange when Alexander Graham Bell co-invented the telephone. This led him to take a fresh look at his work and he decided to get in touch with the great American inventor Thomas Edison.
Puskás now began to concentrate on perfecting his scheme to build a telephone exchange. According to Edison, "Tivadar Puskas was the first person to suggest the idea of a telephone exchange". Puskás's idea finally became a reality in 1877 in Boston. It was then that the Hungarian word "hallom" "I hear you" was used for the first time in a telephone conversation when, on hearing the voice of the person at the other end of the line, an exultant Puskás shouted out in Hungarian "hallom". Thus, this word without the letter "m", i.e. "hallo/hello", that we now use every time we speak into a telephone receiver.[1]
In 1879 Puskás set up a telephone exchange in Paris, where he looked after Thomas Edison's European affairs for the next four years. In Paris he was greatly helped by his younger brother Ferenc Puskás (1848-1884), who later established the first telephone exchange in Pest.
In 1887 Tivadar Puskás introduced the multiplex switchboard, which was a revolutionary step in the development of telephone exchanges. His next invention was the "Telephone News Service" he introduced in Pest, which announced news and "broadcast" programmes and was in many ways the forerunner of the radio. According to a contemporary scientific journal, at the most 50 people could listen to Edison's telephone at the same time, but if a 51st person was connected up, none of the subscribers could hear anything. With Puskás's apparatus, by contrast, half a million people could clearly hear the programme coming from the exchange.
In 1890 Puskás was granted a patent for a procedure for carrying out controlled explosions, which was the forerunner of modern techniques. He experimented with this technology when he was working on regulating the Lower Danube.
Puskás registered the patent of technology behind the telephone newspaper Telefon Hírmondó in 1892, in the Patent Office of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with the title "A new method of organizing and fitting a telephone newspaper".[2] The Telefon Hírmondó service started on 15 February 1893, with around 60 subscribers. After Pusás's death on 16 March 1893, his brother Albert Puskás sold the enterprise and the patent rights to István Popper.
Tivadar Puskás did not win extensive public recognition during his lifetime. However, in 2008, the Hungarian National Bank issued a 1000 Forint commemorative coin in honor of Puskás and the 115th anniversary of the introduction of the Telefon Hírmondó. [3]
[edit] Notes
- ^ A magyar nyelv történeti-etimológiai szótára. (Főszerkesztő Benkő Loránd. I–III. 1967–1976.), Második kötet. 1970. 36. (hungarian)
- ^ Evgeny Katz. Tivadar Puskás. Retrieved on 2007-11-20.
- ^ Magyar Nemzeti Bank - English Site. "Telephone Herald" collector coin. Retrieved on 2008-06-05.
