Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1996

Rövid tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven

Ernő Beszédes and Miklós Dérszegi: Telephony in Budapest on the Millenary and the 1100th Anniversary of the Hungarian Settlement

World Telecommunications Day (May 17) is a recurring commemoration of a great achievement of the human mind, an achievement that allows news, ideas and feelings to transcend distances in space and time. The day was marked by the Postal Museum in 1996 with a small exhibition that tied in with the country’s anniversary celebrations. It showed the telecommunications equipment and network at the time of the millenary (1896) and the 1100th anniversary of the Hungarian Settlement.

The millenary period was represented by a manual 25-line telephone exchange on the LB (local-battery) system, and LB telephone sets (a table set with a magnetic base and a wall-mounted set in a wooden box), and a contemporary six-line switchboard. Also shown was a reconstruction of a pole head from the first overhead trunk line in Hungary (Budapest-Vienna, 1889) and a block of concrete with seven apertures for a cable staddle, with drawing-in cables of copper wire with paper insulation and a lead sheath. Especially interesting is a brass plate that was fixed to the 25,000th block of concrete installed in the Budapest cable system between 1900 and 1905. This bears the incised signatures of the heads of the Post at the time.

The material representing the 1100th anniversary included a large-scale map of Budapest showing the position and capacity of each telephone exchange, and blown-up photographs of present-day 7A2 Rotary, ARF 102 Crossbar, and AXE and EWSD-type digital exchanges. The display cabinets contained some electronic wired and remote telephone sets of today. The present network was represented by fibre-optical overhead cable sets, a plastic pipe with a cable staddle, and vaseline-filled and underground fibre- optic cables in the mouths.

Another display case was devoted to samples of three generations of national trunk telephone cables: the first voice-frequency, symmetrical trunk cable (1928), the first high- capacity, small-coaxial trunk line (1968), and the first international fibre-optic trunk cable (1992). All three were first used on the Budapest-Vienna line.

Júlia Kisfaludi: Token Alternatives

The Postal Museum’s collection of telephone cards, which has grown steadily since it was established in 1993, made its first appearance at a separate exhibition in 1996. This was mounted by Ibolya Bartók and myself in Győr, at the request of the city’s János Xantus Museum.

The main objective was to present the function of telephone cards and the wide range of designs, colours and ideas found on them. However, we wanted to avoid at all costs reducing the display to a kind of miniature picture gallery. So we set out to place telephone cards in the context of telephone history, so that the exhibition came also to cover the history of public telephones. Since telephone cards are replacing coins as a means of operating public telephones, we decided to demonstrate this more clearly and add to the variety of the exhibition by including some of the tokens, jetons and coins used for this purpose around the world. This also suggested the title of the exhibition: Tantusz variáci308