Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1997

Rövid tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven

1893. He and his brother Emile decided to obtain one, as a way of increasing business at the café. The number of guests duly increased and many of them wanted to buy a phonograph. The brothers opened a workshop in a Paris suburb to make them, followed by a factory and a phonograph salon in one of the busiest streets in Paris. The Pathé catalogue of 1899 contained 1500 recordings, reproduced by the American method.

Almost a hundred years after Edison’s phonograph, at the end of the 1970s, appeared the digital recording technique. The digital compact disc was presented in 1981. This ended one chapter and opened another in the history of sound reproduction. The new sound-carrying device, developed jointly by Philips and Sony, differs in almost every parameter and characteristic from the black records used for almost a century.

Erzsébet Angyal: Children and postage stamps

Stamp collecting began to lose its mass appeal in the 1960s. The number of club members and individual collectors steadily fell. More and more collections were left to gather dust or sold. This declining demand and rising supply caused stamp prices to fall sharply, while the number of new issues grew with increasing speed. Gone were the days when our parents, grandparents or school friends went through a longer or shorter period of stamp collecting, as regularly as they caught measles or whooping cough.

Apart from the fact that many collectors are turning their back on stamps, fewer adolescents are passing through the stamp-collecting phase. Indeed stamp collecting by young people has gone through a proportionally greater crisis than adult stamp collecting.

In April the Stamp Museum received a visit from delegates to the National Conference of Young Stamp Collectors, organized by the youth section of the National Association of Stamp Collectors (Mabéosz). With the help of Mihály Józsa and Péter Gidófalvi, staff showed the many children round the museum exhibits in small groups. It was a gratifying task to show the collections to such sincerely interested and inquisitive visitors.

The museum received an invitation in August to contribute to the 2nd Jászberény Meeting of Young Stamp Collectors, part of the town’s series of summer events. Staff gladly complied with the request from the local young people’s stamp-collecting circle, László Gedei, who organized the meeting. The contributions from children to be found among the exhibited materials showed that success does not necessarily require money. The exhibitors had relied on knowledge, an ability to systemize, and a good match of subject and argument with the material to hand, with fine results.

Where do we stand, where are we going? was the title of a professional round-table discussion of youth philately, with group leaders, other interested persons, and representatives of Mabéosz and the Stamp Museum taking part. Speakers recounted good and bad experiences, put forward proposals and ideas, and referred to local and national concerns and successes. Apart from the organization of the summer philatelists’ camp, the most controversial issue was how to change single age-group, school-based system of youth collectors’ circles out of its rigid framework.

On August 21, the Stamp Division of Hungarian Post PLC invited several of the country’s youth stamp-collecting circles to the headquarters of the Hungarian Cultural Foundation for a contest prepared and organized by the Stamp Museum. It was no easy task to

264