The Eighth Tribe, 1978 (5. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1978-01-01 / 1. szám

This article is about a number of important Hungarian scientists and inventors whose fame reached the new world, either because they lived and worked in America or because their inventions were adopted and used there.

FARKAS KEMPELEN (1734-1804) was one of the greatest scientists and inventors of the eighteenth century. His name became known mainly for the chess-playing machine he invented, although the device was created in a playful mood and was originally meant to be a toy. With regard to the machine he invented to simulate human speech, Homer Dudley, a research worker at the Bell Telephone Company, stated at the 1949 Convention of the American Acoustics Society that Hungarian-born Farkas Kempelen was the one who towards the end of the eighteenth century first designed and constructed a perfect and surprisingly well operating speech machine. The physiological experiments and studies making use of the speech machine

Kempelen's chess-playing device

were reported on by Kempelen in his work entitled ’Der Mechanismus der menschlichen Sprache’ (The Mechanism of Human Speech) which laid the foundations for the science of phonetics. Kempelen constructed a typewriter, pontoon bridge, steam engine, fountain for the Schönbrunn Castle, and many other contrivances. After his death, the chessplaying machine was taken on a world tour. When it arrived in New York City on February 3, 1826, which was the first stage of its journey through America, Edgar Allan Poe, the great American poet and novelist, had occasion to witness it; and he later wrote a long article about it in one of the 1836 issues of the “Southern Literary Messenger”.

TIVADAR PUSKAS (1844-1893) was the one who invented the forerunner of the radio, the “telephonograph”, a “journal” broadcast over the wire. From 1878 Puskás worked together with Edison in America, and later on he became Edison’s representative in Europe. Under a contract signed on April 16, 1878 Edison entrusted Tivadar Puskás with full power to publicize his phonograph. Puskás also demonstrated Edison’s giant dynamo, a “Jumbo” weighing 27 tons, in the electronics engineering section of the 1885 World Exhibition in Paris, where it supplied the power for 1,000-1,200 incandescent lamps. Later on, Puskás returned to Hungary; and on the basis of one of his inventions (as was also evidenced by a letter written by Edison), he founded the first telephone exchange ever to operate in the Hungarian capital. Puskás used the same telephone network in his wired broadcasting system to first transmit news items, and later on musical programs as well. In his book entitled “Semantics Versus the First Broadcasting Station”, the American author David L. Woods established in 1967 that the real pioneer of modern radio and television was Tivadar Puskás, because in 1893 he created the first program broadcasting equipment in the world.

>Vl,, Von P~ok«o_----------------^ • 'tttion.no O Í tk.o.—v.

0K«O(*o»>. finnkor kfio p.,t ....... ...

UKtvfct til «rnt'ni I*"

ir I f ftsKcme

ACADEMIC NEWS

János Pap:

LORÁND EÖTVÖS (1848-1919), the great Hungarian physicist and inventor of the torsion-balance, was considered by Einstein to be the most outstanding physicist of his age, a paragon of physics. The Eötvös torsionbalance enables even minute gravitational differences in land masses to be recorded and measured with a very high degree of accuracy. Such measurements in turn enable the inner recesses of the earth to be mapped and also help to locate mineral oil, natural gas and ore deposits. In an article entitled “The

The Eötvös torsion-balance — then and now

Eötvös Experiment” and published in the December 1961 issue of ‘Scientific American’, one of the world’s oldest and foremost scientific journals, R. H. Dieke reported on the modified Eötvös experiments performed by a research team at Princeton University. Upon completion of their tests, the members of the team established that in view of probable sources of error, the accuracy of the measurements made by Eötvös is amazing and almost unbelievable. Repeated tests might have proved that Eötvös was wrong, but this did not happen.

The letter Edison wrote about Tivadar Puskás