Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1997
Rövid tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven
operated on Budapest II, and he was commissioned by Norwegian Radio to supply two signal generators along the same lines. These operated there for ten years and now belong to the Technical and Transport Museum in Oslo. Tomcsányi also designed Hungarian Radio’s first time-signal apparatus, and the first motorized gramophone transmitter with two turntables and two pick-ups. Along with István Baczynszky, he constructed at the Postal Experimental Station the portable field- intensity meter to show the secondary radiation from the Csepel radio-telegraph transmitter tower. Single-handed, he measured the field strength of the 120 kW Csepel transmitter at Balaton and in the Miskolc, Zemplén and Nyíregyháza districts. He made the first sound generator required for measuring sound frequencies. This was the basic source of all measurements at the Postal Experimental Station for a decade. He installed the first wax-cutter, making him a pioneer of Hungarian record production. Hungarian record production in the 1930s was confined to pressing bakelité copies of wax recordings made abroad, until permission was granted to one of the record companies to make recordings at the radio. Tomcsányi made 1200-2000 recordings over a ten- year period. Apart from designing portable amplifiers, Tomcsányi was also involved in the first experiments and measurements with gelatine or film cutters. These allowed recordings to be made in a postal testing van fitted with an electricity generator. After the Arrow-Cross coup, Tomcsányi declined to take part in broadcasting party events. The Radio Inspectorate began to keep him under constant observation and tap his telephone. He was already working for the resistance. On January 14,1945, Tomcsányi managed to prevent the Germans from destroying the amplifiers. In the event they took out the switches and took only one of the main amplifying transmitters away. The order came for the engineers to retreat to Magyaróvár on the western border, but Tomcsányi stayed behind in Budapest, hiding for three weeks in a furnace room. On March 1, 1945, the work of Béla Tomcsányi, Gyula Kodolányi and László Garai allowed the free Hungarian Radio to sound. In 1947, Tomcsányi turned a grey bus into a mobile broadcasting unit. On October 1, 1949, the technical staff were transferred from the Post to Hungarian Radio, which was headed by István Szirmai. The man appointed as Tomcsányi’s deputy was the same Péter Tóth who had dismissed Bendegúz Szabó as chief engineer of the Telephone News Dispenser service, for his ostensibly clericalist views. Tomcsányi spent November 7, 1949 in Moscow with Szirmai. If he still had any illusions, they were dispelled by this experience. Early in October 1950, a sabotage plot was ostensibly discovered in the Technical Department of Hungarian Radio. There was no main accused, however. Béla Tomcsányi had poisoned himself with potassium cyanide on October 2, 1950. His wife and close colleagues described him as a completely exhausted, nerve-wracked man who had been driven to death. Other members of that generation of engineers saw him as a victim of conscience. What can have been the truth of the matter? There can hardly be any other explanation than that this exalted generation of engineers had given up the unequal struggle by 1950. 258
