Magyar News, 1993. szeptember-1994. augusztus (4. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1993-10-01 / 2. szám
ÁNYOS JEDLIK AND HIS ELECTRIC MACHINE Education and scientific research were usually tied together in Hungary. So was it during the first half of the nineteenth century. The educators of science, in a way, were remote from the competing world. They invented many things in their laboratories and let these inventions gather dust in old fashioned glass cabinets. Another factor that kept inventors from patenting was their patriotism. At that time, Hungary did not have a Patent Office. Inventors had to go to the Hapsburg court in Vienna to make out their applications. These were the circumstances when Ányos Jedlik, a Benedictine monk, who was also a professor in physics, started teaching and was developing the science of physics. Jedlik, the son of poor parents from a small Hungarian village, started his teaching career in the city of Gy or in the 1820s and continued at the University ofPesL In 1854,more than a decade before the Compromise with the Austrian ruling house, Ányos Jedlik was the first professor at a Hungarian university to teach in the Hungarian language. Also Jedlik was the first to write a university textbook in Hungarian on physics. Enough said at this time about him as an educator. Now I would like to talk about Ányos Jedlik as the inventor. During his first years in Byor, Jedlik built the first electromotor in the world, which transformed electrical energy into revolving motion. In later years, he pursued this invention and made it into an electrical motorcoach model suitable for driving. The size of this model unfortunately was small enough to fit into the glass cabinet. On the shelf, next to the motorcoach, there was another toy-like device. It was a horizontal cylinder with rings around it, some gears, and a crank on the end of the contraption. Probably there was a label stating that it was built in the shop of a mechanic, Mr. Nuss in Pest. This little machine, another invention of Jedlik, was the first dynamo, an electric generator, ever to be made. It preceded by eight years the claimed discovery of the dynamo in 1866, by the German industrialist, Werner von Siemens. A few years later, Siemens was responsible in bringing another Jedlik invention to public attention. This invention was the forerunner of the impulse generators which are now widely applied in nuclear engineering and research all over the world. For his accomplishments, Siemens recommended that Ányos Jedlik be awarded the “Medal for Progress” at the 1873 Vienna World Exhibition. The list of Jedlik’s accomplishments arc much longer. He made his mark in optics, as in chemistry, and with some of his other inventions Jedlik was a half-a-century ahead of his colleagues of more advanced countries in the field of technology. Unfortunately, Jedlik wasn’t an isolated case. FLYING COLORS FROM SPACE Péter Goldmark Péter Goldmark. Many of us knew him. We saw him at Hungarian events, or at church. Also many people missed noticing him because he was very quiet, very humble, and on the surface the great talent and the satisfaction of accomplishments never really showed. Bom in 1906, in Budapest, he received his Ph.D. in physics from the Universities of Vienna and Berlin. He came to the U.S. in 1933, and a couple of years later Goldmark became the chief engineer of the Page 6 television research department of the CBS Laboratories. He was the right person for the job. You should know that Péter Goldmark in 1929 at the age of 23 had already built his own television receiver with a screen not bigger than a postage stamp. It would be a long list if I talked about all of his individual inventions and accomplishments, but all of them had the aspect of handling visual and oral information. It was a great moment in the history of broadcasting when in August, 1940 the first color pictures were sent through the air from CBS’s experimental transmitter in New York. This system was developed by Péter Goldmark and after so many years this system is still used in closed-circuit medical, educational and industrial applications because these cameras are much smaller and lighter than other standard models in use. Another achievement of his was the invention of the microgroove longplaying record. This made it possible to compress six of the 78 rpm phonograph records into a single disk. His work also went out to space. Some years ago while we were sitting in front of our TV sets being amazed at the clarity of the pictures sent from the moon, we didn’t know that Péter Goldmark made this all possible. The Lunar Orbiter was taking the pictures from 29 miles above the moon’s surface and was transmitting it back to Earth through the distance of238,000 miles. At this time Goldmark also developed a new kind of metalic solid lubricant that didn’t freeze in the extreme cold and didn’t boil up in the vacuum of the electron tube. This lubricant also made it possible for the bearings to function through the mission. With a very complex computer system, the CBS laboratory built the Linotron, and ultra-high-speed photocomposing machine. With this Goldmark was able to produce in extreme high quality the printing of a thousand characters per second. To print out a well-filled page out of a typewriter would only take one-and-a-half seconds. He also ventured into the field of education with a miniaturized optical-tape that was stored in a small cartridge. The recorder-player would hook up to the TV the same way as the known video games. It could be used to any or even many TV sets, and it would give the teacher the flexibility to record film, tape or photograph in either black and white, or in color. He could show the image in motion or frozen in a still picture. For all of his work Péter Goldmark received many prizes and awards, and achieved international recognition. (C.MB.)
