Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1999-2000

Beszámolók és tervek - Tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven

members of the three founding companies were given permanent entry passes to the museums, which they could visit free-of-charge. Ever since, 1,500-2,000 people with these passes have stopped by the museums every single year.

1995 went down in Foundation history as the year the Radio and Television Museum was opened in Diósd. Thanks to some substantial financial help from MATAV, the scientific legacy of Dr. György Békésy, Nobel Prize winning acoustic postal engineer arrived in July as a gift from the University of Hawaii and became part of the exhibition material. The Stamp Museum received valuable gifts and was able to hold 19 temporary exhibitions, an all-time record. The year also marked the opening of the Stagecoach Exhibit Hall in Debrecen, illustrating how the concept of a foundation as a vehicle had taken hold. The permanent exhibition at the Stagecoach Hall presents the history of the postal service, telecommunications and broadcasting in Debrecen, where there also is a memorial hall to the philatelic legacy of its major donor, botanical scientist and Academy of Sciences member Dr. Rezső Soó. A memorial park was built in the open-air exhibit area of the Radio andTelevision Museum at Diósd, where the outstanding personalities of broadcasting history are commemorated. As the past five years have shown, not only does the profession visit the memorial columns on the site year after year to bow their heads in homage, but so do schoolchildren aspiring to enter the profession. The museum’s audiocollection grew by 150 audiocassettes that year, prepared by pre-schoolers and school- children for a contest called “Our Radio. ” In fifty or sixty years, they will have become rare documents of language and local history, and of general culture.

1996, the 1,100th anniversary of the arrival of the Magyar tribes to the land that is now Hungary, held the promise of a wonderful opportunity for the Stamp Museum. The Antenna Hungária Telecom Company offered it the Erzsébet Telephone Exchange, one of the earliest facilities in Budapest, as a site for its permanent display. The new site would have offered the Stamp Museum an opportunity to double the display area, which would have enabled it to expand its collection space, and to provide a home for the library and archives of the two museums. Though, by 1999, the design had been changed and the available space was cut, it still appeared that the Hungarian Postal Service would go through with the investment. But, in February of 2000, the Ministry of Transport, Telecommunications and Water Management dropped the project without any explanation. (The Foundation has been calling for reinstatement of the plan every hour of the day ever since, having recognised the near impossibility of economically using the windowless rooms of the exchange, which once housed the machinery and the cable distribution centre, for any purpose other than a stamp collection that requires little light and only modest temperature controls.) The one-time post office at the National Historical Memorial Park at Ópusztaszer was renovated in 1996. A central piece of the new exhibit, doubling as a three-language visitor guide, is a fully operational model of the Telephone News Service designed by pioneering telecom engineer Tivadar Puskás, which, in its own day, announced news and relayed programmes, and was in many ways the forerunner of the radio.

The Foundation’s first up-to-date collection archives and safekeeping space was set up in 1997, in the attic of the MATÁV Telecom Corporation’s Embedded Control Centre in Rákospalota, a district of Budapest, funded by MATAV. As can be seen on the 1997 Yearbook’s cover photo, it became home to the Foundation’s design archives and collec227