Magyar News, 2004. szeptember-2005. augusztus (15. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

2005-02-01 / 6. szám

You say “HELLO”

You should say “HALLOM”

Every time one answers the phone they say Hello. Some more arrogant say: Yes, what do you want. Well it isn’t quite polite. Hallo should be the word Then there are those who would say Hello when meeting a friend in the street with no phone around.I have even seen letters where the salutation is just a Hello. It is an accomplishment for a simple distorted Hungarian word to move into so many facets of our life. In this article you will learn how it started with the Hungarian inventor, Tivadar Puskás.

He was bom in Pest on September 17th 1844. His family was part of the Transylvanian nobility, Father ditroi Ferenc Puskas was a shipping contractor. Puskás studied law in Vienna, and later technical subjects at the Technical University in Budapest. He was a multi talented person he practiced fencing, horseback riding, and was an excellent piano player. This helped him to stay with the Festetics family where he also studied English.

First he was living in England and working for the Warnin Railway Construction Company for a short time. Then he returned to Hungary. In 1873 interested in the then existing passion for travel, he founded the Puskás Travel Agency on the occasion of the World Exhibition in Vienna. It was the fourth agency in the world and the first travel agency to be established in Eastern Europe.

After this he tried his fortune in

Tivadar Puskás. The word he said is used all over the world

America. In Colorado he opened up a mine and began to dig for gold. Puskás in addition to being an entrepreneur was an inventor and was continually testing technical problems. He was working on his idea for a telegraph exchange when Alexander Graham Bell 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 Puskás was the first person to suggest the idea of a telephone exchange”. Puskás’s

finally made his idea became a reality in Boston in 1877 . It was then that the word “hallom” which later became the word “hallo / hello”. Losing the end of the word came about people getting confused. At times he sad “hallom” (I hear you) and other times he said “hallod?”(do you hear me?). The people around figured it is easier to drop the last letter and say hallo. In 1879 Puskas 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 established the first telephone exchange in Pest.

In 1887 Tivadar Puskás introduced the multiplex switchboard which was a revolutionary step in the development of tele-Edison s factory in Newark, NJ

phone exchanges. The next invention was the Telephone News Service that he began in Pest. This announced news and „broadcast” programs and was the forerunner of

On the left: Ferenc Puskás, brother of Tivadar, established the telephone exchange in Budapest.

To the right: A switchboard showing that the wires were plugged in manually.

Page 2