Holló Szilvia Andrea: Budapest's Public Works - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

Direct current versus alternating current

6o work&hopi well-suited to the needi oh Hungarian artiiam and small-scale manufacturers on a site provided with electricity for illumination and propulsion by ourselves. ”

The other winner, the Budapest General Electric Co. founded by the General Austrian Illumination Gas Company, lagged behind its competitor with its two generators yielding alternating current at 66 kW each at a time its counterpart turned out 1,000 kW with its generator plant. BÁV Rt. started electricity production on i November 1893 also on the fringe of Leopold Town. (The main building was demolished in 1992 with no more than the huge, neo-classicist, gateway of the housing development called Caesar House (Cézár-ház) built on the site left standing in Visegrádi utca as a reminder.) The site was cut across by Csáky (today's Hegedűs Gyula) utca; the coal lot lay toward Pannónia utca with the machine and boiler houses standing on the opposite side of the street. The area was criss-crossed with railway lines as goods wagons were shunted to the plant from the Vizafogó and the Budapest- Leopold Town stations as well as the docks on the Danube.

A battery unit was laid out for the storage of direct current, a plant the likes of

■ The plant, except for its portal, was tom down in 1992. Now only the Caesar House gate evokes its memory

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