Kiss Katalin: Industrial Monuments - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1993)
of Hungary’s best restored industrial monuments-the large hall of the chill-casting foundry of the Ganz Works, built in the middle of the last century. The founder of the works, Ábrahám Ganz was born in 1814 in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland. He learnt casting, then he toured as a journeyman, first in Germany, then to Vienna. In 1841 he arrived in Pest, and became the first master, and later the director of the newly established foundry of the Pest Roller Mill Company. In 1845 he bought a property in Bem utca, where he installed a foundry of his own. Between 1846 and 1848, when the first waggons from Nürnberg arrived for the first Hungarian railway line (Vác-Szolnok), Ganz examined the cast wheels which were of American origin, and he began to experiment. As a result, in 1853 he began to produce waggon wheels of chilled cast iron. (The chilled cast iron-or hard casting-is an iron casting where the surface or some other part is harder than the rest. Examining its fracture, we can see crystallized white fibres which spread from the softer parts. In the white parts the iron’s carbon content is absorbed chemically, in the grey ones physically (in the form of graphite). The static properties of the chilled cast iron are very favourable.) The wheels of the Ganz Works, in view of the production costs of domestic industry, were much cheeper than the American ones. Thus the firm soon got considerable orders, not only from the Austrian and Hungarian State Railways, but also from railway companies throughout Europe. The new foundry, still standing today, was built in 1858 for accomplishing these commissions. üntil 1895 when steel casts gradually gained ground, ninety thousand rail crossings and sidings, and seven hundred thousand waggon wheels were produced here. In 1859 the mechanical engineer András Mechwart began to work with Ábrahám Ganz. Their most important joint invention, the Ganz-Mechwart roll mill in chilled cast iron, was produced from 1874. The appearance of this modern heavy-duty crusher marked the beginning of the golden age of the modern milling industry. The foundry, a cradle of many world-famous products and inventive ideas, worked continuously right 9
