Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1994
Rövid tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven
János Kiss and Mrs Gergely Kovács: Collection of Historic Postal, Telecommunications and Radio and Television Items The article examines a particular area of the museums’ collection activity: organized collection trips to the areas of postal inspectorates. Museum staff identify installations and equipment of museum value that are still in use, schedule these as protected, attach bronze labels, and register them. The post offices concerned are entrusted with the care and protection of these in situ. The article describes the seven collection trips made in 1990-94. It includes the registered details of the 137 items scheduled, of which nine have now joined the museum collection. Miklós Dérszegi: Additions to the Archive of Distribution-System Instruments An important side of renewing the museum’s archive of utility distribution is to collect and register the instruments used and group them under their functions. Thirteen instruments were added to the collection in 1994. These consist of quality- control instruments, cable-fault locators and general electrical measuring instruments. The quality-control accessions include electrical instruments (auxiliary equipment for measuring cross-talk attenuation and an insulation resistance gauge), apparatus worked by chemical reagents (a portable gas detector), and a mechanically operating instrument (a pressure gauge). The cable-fault detector is electronic. The general electrical measuring instruments (DC and AC voltage, current and resistance meters) operate with a basic moving-coil instrument. Lajos Bartha: Portable Sundial in the Postal Museum Inventory No. 84.8.0 in the collection of postal history items belonging to the Postal Museum is a portable table sundial complete with its gnomon. Although it has been placed among the museum’s domestic relics, it is a time-keeper of a kind once used by postal and transport services all over the world. Sundials are the oldest astronomically accurate time-keepers. Small, portable sundials were in use in Ancient Times. They only became widespread, however, with the need to regulate mechanical timepieces, which were inaccurate, unreliable and expensive. Demand for sundials began to grow significantly in the 18th century. The departure and arrival of postal couriers and stage coaches tended increasingly to follow an accurate timetable. When the railways appeared in the 19th century, trains had to keep time accurate to the minute. This was difficult because smaller towns still lacked a sufficiently reliable instrument to publish the time. In many places the use of a sundial was the official way of regulating the clocks. (There was an „official” sundial on the front of London’s main post office at the end of the 18th century. Catherine the Great of Russia ordered milestones equipped with sundials to be erected in larger towns and along major roads in her empire.) The Postal Museum’s portable table sundial is a typical example with a dial in the equatorial (equinoctial) plane. The base is an octagonal, silver-plated copper plate with Baroque-style foliation round the rim. Sunk into the middle of the horizontal base plate is 216
