Molnár József - Szilas Péter: Night Lights - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1993)

For all the stipulations it made, the city council did not manage to strike an advantageous deal with the contractors. The populace of Pest found the brightness of the gas lighting poor and its price exorbitant. The new contract signed a few years later with another firm, Trieste General Austrian Gas Co., was not much more of a bargain than the one it replaced as under its terms the city and individual consumers were at the mercy of the foreign company. The contract bound the city for decades, which hindered the introduction of electric lighting. At its general assembly held in April 1879, the Municipal Board of Budapest drew up a new, consolidated contract, which commissioned the gas company, besides fulfilling its other service-related obligations, to light the streets of Budapest with gas until the end of 1895. The streets which would continue to be lit by oil lamps were, of course, excepted. The least advantageous to the city of all the mutually binding terms was the one which stipulated that it was not to commission any third party to light its public spaces, should that party offer gas or any other means of lighting.

Public lighting by electricity

Progress was not to be halted, however. In 1867, the dynamo was invented and arc lamps also appeared, and by 1876 the arc lamp had been introduced as a source of public lighting in France.

Hungarian electricians have also made a contribution to the development of electric lighting. The Ganz Factory for example illuminated Ganz utca with arc lights of its own manufacture, which act was the first instance of electric lamps being used as the source of public lighting in Hungary. Rescue work during the 1879 Szeged flood was also conducted in lighting provided by arc lamps. The following year the skating rink in the City Park was illuminated in the same manner.

During the 1885 visit of the heir apparent and his wife to Budapest, 36 arc lamps were temporarily used to light the route followed by the royals and their entourage. Regrettably, these lamps were then removed.

It was also in 1885 that three extremely talented Hungarian engineers, Károly Zipernowsky, Miksa Déri and Ottó Titusz Bláthy, invented the transformer. Now that the power was there, what the further career of electric lighting depended on was the quality of the light source. As such, it was Edison’s carbon-fibre electric bulb that achieved remarkable success. Its power con16