Technikatörténeti szemle 18. (1990-1991)

TANULMÁNYOK - Trudeau, Terence: The Work and Life of John Csonka

ced the two inventors to act at once to protect then rights. Accordingly, the patent application was submitted in great haste, the very next day. The Hungarian patent was issued on May 3, 1894, 10891/1893. Csonka was an extremely modest man and did not care much for publicity, thus for a long time the invention of the atomizing carburetor did not appear in the technical literature. However, it just so happened that not much later the German Daimler company's famous chief engineer, Wilhelm Maybach, also designed an atomizing carburetor. There is no evidence to suggest that he obtained this idea from the work of Bánki and Csonka. It appears that he re-invented the device independently. When Maybach applied for a German patent his request was rejected, because the patent office already knew about the Bánki-Csonka carburetor. In order to receive at least some patent coverage, despite the German rejection, Maybach applied for a French patent on August 17, 1893. This time he did manage to receive a patent, No. 232 230, since the French patent office in those days did not carry out any preliminary investigation of existing foreign patents before issuing a French patent. This patent had, of course, little practical value. It is a fact that the Bánki-Csonka patent had six months and six days priority over the Maybach patent. Furthermore, the first Bánki-Csonka carburetor was built long before the inventors applied for the Hungarian patent. An article by Dr. P. Vajda, edited by the publishing house of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, quotes Oscar Glatz, a former foreman of Csonka who was still alive in 1941: "By the autumn of 1891, the carburetor was completed after a year and a half of experimentation and preparatory work, including the carburetor's float valve chamber and the float-valve control."He was able to pintpoint the time as the autumn of 1891, since it was then that Oscar Glatz was called up for military service. By then, with the carburetor completed, the two inventors tinned their attention to improving the ignition system. (Their new system was the patented ignition tube, designed, to replace the flame ignition system used in those days, which represented a major fire hazard.) It is. also a fact that Maybach employed a petrol dropping apparatus with his first carburetor, while in the Bánki-Csonka invention the float secured a constant fuel level. It is clear, therefore, that the Bánki-Csonka device not only had priority, but was of a superior design. In spite of this, in most of the technical literature available today, including the majority of reference volumes, W. Maybach is listed as the inventor of the carburetor. Maybach himself, however, was fully aware that the Bánki-Csonka patent had priority over his, and in a letter to Bánki he acknowledged this fact. More recently, in a document dated October 7, 1982 and addressed to Albert B. Csonka, son of John Csonka, the Deutches Museum in Munich, Germany, which owns an original Bánki-Csonka carburetor, also confirmed the world priority of the Bánki-Csonka atomizing carburetor. On November 30, 1896, the two Hungarian inventors also applied for patent protection for then carburetor in the United States. As a result, the United States Patent Office issued patent 595, 552 (Fig. 6).