Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1999-2000
Beszámolók és tervek - Tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven
Mrs. Gergely Kovács The Postal Museum and its Collections The history of the Postal Museum starts in the 1880’s. Marking the occasion of a National Exhibition in 1885, the Budapest Telegraphic Service Management designed a display of collectors’ items it had been setting aside over the years. Later, additional items were added to the collection and it was moved into a single room at the Main Post Office in Budapest, a room that bore the sign, Telegraphic Museum. In 1887, at the time when the post office and the telegraphic service merged, the collection had grown to 700 items, no longer fitting into the single room, which was otherwise strongly coveted by an overcrowded administration staff that needed the space. So, they petitioned the responsible minister of the time, Gábor Baross, to close down the Telegraphic Museum. The matter was turned over to two men, Péter Heim and Kálmán Pfannschmidt for investigation and on their recommendation, Baross ordered the closure of the Telegraphic Museum and the simultaneous establishment of the Postal and Telegraphic Museum. Most of the display material in the postal hall at the millennium exhibition of 1896 came from this collection, and from relics collected in response to an appeal issued by the Postal and Telegraphic Corporation on 14 July 1894. The display hall was designed to remain in operation as the new Postal Museum once the millennium exhibition came to an end. An exhibition hall for the transport sector was built with a similar intent, and following some expansion it has housed the Museum of Transport ever since. However, the government commission set up to oversee the exhibition called for the demolition of the postal hall because of problems with high ground water seepage. Some of the materials in the display were transferred to the Museum of Transport, but most of it was turned over to the Resource Management Office of the National Post Office and Telegraphic Service. The first official document on establishing a museum dates from this time, that is, from 17 October 1897. In it, the Commerce Minister approves a list of objects considered worthy of placement in the Postal Museum. Reading the document, we also learn that the person responsible for storing the artifacts and completing the inventory (listed as 546 to 579 items) was Postal Counselor Lajos Oberhauszer. A decree entitled Establishing the Postal Museum was issued on 22 April 1931, calling attention to the issue of collecting artifacts of value to telecommunications history. It stipulates that the Central Warehouse for Postal Materials and the Central Postal Vehicle Depot were mandated to set aside one item of each type of material, instrument and vehicle withdrawn from service, to be saved for posterity.. The term Establishing in the decree did not refer to the museum but to a group of collections. From that point on, as materials were archived they were entered in three sets of logs. The museum, together with its offices, was finally placed in eight rooms on the third floor of Budapest’s Lágymányos Telephone Exchange Building. The museum eventually became the recipient of the artifacts displayed to mark the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian telephone, which was moved from Post Office Headquarters. Manager Anna 229
