Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1997

Rövid tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven

There was no European type of communications system in the Ottoman Empire. Orders and messages were conveyed by specially selected and trained military persons known as chiauses, who were more highly educated and spoke languages. They also took part in the reception and guarding of foreign envoys, and undertook guard duties in the court of the sultan or military commanders.

The services of messengers were also performed by servants known as pejks, who walked or ran by the sultan’s horse and were known for their exceptional speed.

Kinga Csibi: In memory of Iréneusz József Károly

Iréneusz József Károly anticipated Marconi in recognizing the principle of the wireless telegraph, and conducted a successful experiment with it. He was a Premonstratensian priest, teacher and physicist, and one of the Hungarian pioneers of radio technology.

Bom on March 6,1854, Károly was admitted to the Premonstratensian grammar school in Kassa (Kosice), and joined the order at the age of 16. He spent his probationer years in Vác. After school, he taught at Selmecbánya (Banská Stiavnica), while attending lectures in mathematics and physics at the Mining Academy. In 1875 he requested admission into the Premonstratensian house at Jászóvár (Jasov), where he adopted the name Iréneusz. After theological studies in Innsbruck, he gained a teaching diploma in physics, mathematics, geography and philosophy at Kolozsvár (Cluj), followed by a doctorate of philosophy in 1886. Meanwhile he had taken his oath as a monk on January 1,1880. In August of the same year he was appointed a teacher at the order’s Nagyvárad (Oradea) grammar school, where he taught divinity, arithmetic, geometry, physics and natural sciences until 1912.

At Nagyvárad he ran a physics club, and realized what a need his students had gain knowledge by experience. He demonstrated scientific experiments in the school’s well- equipped laboratory. It was there that he appears to have discovered the principle of wireless telegraphy before Marconi. However, he was unable to perfect his invention because the young Marconi published his, which was immediately patented.

In 1912 Károly was appointed a full professor of philosophy at the Nagyvárad Academy of Law. In 1916 he endowed a physics competition for school students. Among those who won it over the years were Ede Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, the physicist Lóránd Gerő, and Leó Szilárd, who designed the first uranium reactor. Between 1907 and 1917 he also taught natural sciences at Kolozsvár University.

Károly first learnt of C.W. Roentgen’s work from a publication by Vince Wartha. He published an account of successful experiments he did, on animals and on human bones, in the local Nagyvárad newspaper. In 1896 he reported to Cardinal Lőrinc Schlauch on the discovery and uses of X-rays, explaining how useful it would be to have an X-ray laboratory in Nagyvárad. Eventually the city fathers decided to launch a public subscription to purchase a machine.

In September of the same year, Károly spent three weeks in Germany, during which he visited Roentgen’s laboratory at Würzburg and saw an exhibition of X-ray machines and pictures in Frankfurt, where he bought the equipment for his city. This laboratory continued to play an important part in the Nagyvárad medical service until the first X-ray room was completed at the public hospital.

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