Botár Imre – Károlyi Zsigmond: Vásárhelyi Pál, a Tisza-szabályozás tervezője (Vízügyi Történeti Füzetek 2. Budapest, 1970)

Idegennyelvű kivonatok

SERIES OF HYDRAULIC ENGINEERING HISTORY IN HUNGARY No. 2 Published by: Hydraulic Documentation and Information Centre P. Vásárhelyi, designer of regulation works on the Tisza River The life and activities of P. Vásárhelyi, the greatest Hungarian hydraulic engineer of the „reform era" is described. In Hungarian history „reform era " is referred to as the preindustrial evolution period, preceding the industrial revolution, the era of transition from feudalism into capitalism and awakening of national consciousness, which lasted from 1825 to 1848. The main achievement of this era was the establishment of the economic and technical foundations, i.e., the creation of a traffic network on water and land for the development or trading and commerce, furthermore the enhancement of agricultural production and for this objective the laying of the foundations for the related industries such as shipbuilding, metalworking and mills. The main promoter behind the solution of these economic-technical development problems, the initiator of the development of traffic, steam navigation, regulation of the rapids section of the Danube called the ,,lron Gate", building of the Chain Bridge in Budapest and flood control in the interest of agriculture was I. Széchenyi, the most progressive and open-minded of Hungarian aristocrats, who has been named the ,,

greatest Hungarian" and whose most significant collaborator and permanent technical adviser was P. Vásárhelyi. Pál Vásárhelyi (1795—1846) completed his engineering studies at the „Instutum Geometricum" attached to the Faculty of Philosophy, university of Arts and Sciences, Budapest, whence he graduated in 1816. He started his professional career at the large-scale hydrographie surveying of the Hungarian rivers (Körös system, Danube, Tisza etc.) conducted from 1818 to 1846, first as co-operator (1818 to 1829), subsequently as the engineer in chief (1829 to 1835). In the course of this work, that started with the laying out of a triangulation and levelling network, and the establishment of the river gauges, almost 2 500 maps to scale 1:3 600 and round 10 000 cross-sections, further detailed longitudinal profiles had been prepared for a 950 km long section of the Danube. The geodetical survey was comleted by observation data on flow velocities and rates of streamflow. Characteristic of the accuracy of the survey is that the maps drawn for the rocky rapids section of the Danube, where no changes in the channel occured, were used sixty years later (1890 to 1898) in preparing the plans and designs for the river regulation work. (These maps of unparaI lei led significance have been made available to the wider interested