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

Direct current versus alternating current

the transverse cables were attached to the poles of the power line or else the lamp was mounted on the pole itself. The first instances of ornamental floodlighting were also the spectacular results of Pál Szekér’s work: the Fishermen's Bastion and Matthias Church were first lit up in 1928. They were followed first by St Gellért’s statue, then by the Citadella, the Parliament Building, the Royal Castle and the Elizabeth lookout tower on János Hill, which was festooned with a string of low-intensity incandescent lights. The same concept was used with the Chain Bridge, whose first ornamental lighting was unique in the whole of Europe (1937), but not the lower segment of the pillars, the bridge appeared to be floating above the water. The 34th International Eucharistic Congress marking the 900th anniversary of the death of King St Stephen 1 was an occasion on which several ecclesiastic buildings were floodlit.

With the number of street lights drastically increasing, the workload of lamp operators had to be reduced by enabling them to turn off lights in groups rather than one by one. This was achieved with automatic switchboards built into the walls of buildings, the lampposts and, in outlying areas, attached to the pylons of overhead power lines. The rudimentary fixtures were not yet adjustable to changes in the weather, and as they were operated independently of each other, it happened on occasion that one side of the street was awash in bright light, while the other remained pitch dark. The installation of a new system in which each light was turned on and off with a single central switch was started in 1931. Testifying to the foresight of the age is the fact that the gas lights making up a third of the total system of street illumination were not dismantled either, with the two types of lamp standing in a mixed line along the street, and thus if either system failed the city was still not left in the dark.

When both large private corporations had been acquired by the municipality, the standardisation of the system could no longer be postponed. Due to its higher capacity, the future undoubtedly belonged to alternating current distribution, but by that time such a large network of direct current distribution had been installed in the Inner City and Inner-Buda which could not be phased out in a short time. (It was not completely eliminated before the early sixties until which time improvements to it had to be made for a while, and for that reason the Inner-City central had to be built in Gerlóczy utca.)

The Kelenföld Central gradually took over the loading of the older stations, which necessitated, among other things, the raising of distribution voltage levels. For that purpose medium voltage (30 kV) was selected. As soon as the network had been built, connection by way of transmission lines was established between Budapest and the Bánhida station of the Hungarian Electricity Co. to supplement power supplies with

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