Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1996

Rövid tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven

István Kurucz

‘It all depends on us, on our aspiring.’ István Széchenyi (1791-1860)

Foreword

Everything is changing. We no longer live as our forefathers lived, or think or act as they did. Our means are different and our opportunities. The change is constant, in time and space. What is permanent, however, is the recognition that all new things rest in some way on what has gone before, on the attainments of our forebears, their work, and their experience.

This can be seen plainly in the case of technical advances. The mobile phone of today could never have arisen without the telephones of old. The same hardly applies to developments in society, least of all to information that yields apparently futile findings. What a lot of money, effort, and above all, time it would save to gain a better insight into this non-technical knowledge, make a closer study of it, and then put it to better use. For it is also a discovery to find and identify the blind alleys, once and for all, although the real winners will be those who avoid them, not those who discover them.

‘There is nothing new under the sun,’ as the saying goes. Behind it I sense the same ideas, and the notion that within the constant, unceasing process of change, the past repeats itself in the present, on a higher plane, utilizing the attainments of earlier times. So a knowledge of the past, of the experience that has gone before, is of vital importance.

Of the many concerned with conveying such knowledge, museums and museum staff have a significant role to play. Hungary celebrated the 1100th anniversary of the Hungarian Settlement in 1996. This was also on opportunity for the Foundation to recall the past, reconjure the country’s history. As part of it, we were able to present the development of the post office, mount exhibitions, commemorate Tivadar Puskás and his invention, the telephonic news dispenser, take pride in telecommunications achievements at the turn of the century, and draw strength from the successes and failures of the last hundred years.

The past can also be seen as the source of the great present-day period of change, with its aspirations and opportunities to make a new beginning. The compilers of this yearbook and the authors of the studies it contains have aspired to make it, from cover to cover, an embodiment of this period of change, and of the pains the Foundation took in 1996 to present the past. Confident that readers who peruse and study this book will find that this noble aspiration has been fulfilled, I would like to express my thanks to the authors and compilers for their efforts.

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