Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1993
Kiállítási emlékezések - Angol nyelvű összefoglalók
Piroska Farkas Krizsák: The Tivadar Puskás Exhibition p. 34 The exhibition at the Postal Museum presented the life of Tivadar Puskás and his invention, the telephone news service. Bom on September 17, 1844 in Pest, Puskás began his higher education at the Theresianum in Vienna, and continued it at the Pest Technical University, displaying even as a young man his talents as a polymath and a linguist. In 1867 he joined the firm of Waring Brothers & Eckersly, which began to build the Nagyvárad-Kolozsvár-Brassó railway in Transsylvania. He returned with the prestige of having worked for an English firm alongside English engineers. Later on, Puskás opened a travel agency in Vienna. Then he was taken with gold fever and sailed for America. On his return to Europe in 1876, he began to set up a business in London and Brussels as a contractor for telegraph systems. But on hearing the news of Bell’s invention of the telephone, Puskás sailed for America again, where he met Thomas Alva Edison in the autumn of 1876. He was soon publicizing Edison’s phonograph, carbon-filament lamp and other inventions at exhibitions and demonstrations, as Edison’s European representative. He based himself in Paris, where he directed the installation of the first telephone service and designed and installed electric lighting in the new Opéra building. Busy on other projects, he put his younger brother Ferenc in charge of instituting the Hungarian telephone service; the first phone rang in Budapest on May 1, 1881. Puskás and his family returned to Budapest to complete the telephone system, after the untimely death of Ferenc. Then the idea of a telephone news service occurred to him, with the news being read in a central studio and heard by telephone in several places at once. Shortly after the news service began, Puskás died of a heart attack, on March 16, 1893. The memory of Tivadar Puskás is preserved in buildings, institutions and statues in stone and wood. Awards, prizes, schools and streets bear his name. His telephone news service was patented in Budapest in 1892, and began broadcasting on February 15, 1893. It gave fresh news on the hour, with parliamentary and stock-market reports, reviews of leaders in the dailies, and music programmes. Júlia Kisfaludi: p. 42 A Puskás Memorial Contest for Students Partly for educational reasons and partly as a contribution to the Tivadar Puskás centenary events, the idea arose in January of setting a task for the students of the country’s postal and telecommunications secondary schools. How much did they know about the life of Puskás, the telephone news service, and the times in which Puskás lived? The scheme for a contest of trade and cultural-history knowledge had soon matured in our minds. 137
