Holló Szilvia Andrea: Budapest's Public Works - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

Direct current versus alternating current

flowers, which residents could then plant in the window boxes of their upper-storey flats. Those who neglected their flowers were assumed to be neglectful of their environment at large, and if the suspicion was substantiated, the negligent resident lost his tenancy.

The workers' colony was opened in four successive phases between i July and i November 1913, but the number of flats proved to be insufficient in the first year already. Construction work could not be resumed before the end of the war, when building material obtained from the gasholders demolished in Francis Town was used with the construction of ten new flats here, but this extension could not keep pace with growing demands. The continuation of the development was cut short by World War II. The former workers' and employees’ estate is still used for residential purposes, but in the last twenty years all communal services have been terminated with the sole exception of the nursery school.

Direct current versus alternating current

Electricity was known as early as ancient times but centuries had to pass before it occurred to anyone that the phenomenon could be put to use, and as late as the 18th century experiments were still seen as belonging to the realm of mystical saloon science. The exploitation of electricity for practical purposes and inquiries into the effects of electric power started with the invention of the Galvanic cell, after which new developments began to follow one another at an increasing pace. In 1802 the first spark flared up between two charcoal sticks in an experiment carried out by the English Humphrey Davy and in ten years' time the first arc lamp was made. That, however, was little more than a curiosity as its meagre light could be used for nothing much at the beginning. As the properties of electric power came gradually to be disclosed, electricity began to appear as an increasingly attractive alternative to the unwieldy, and lower light-intensity means of using gas in street illumination. The first time electricity was experimented with in street lighting was in 1855, when Lacassagne and Thiers tried it out in Paris. The Gazette de France carried a report on the spectacular result of the experiment: "The source of the illumination throwing its light into a large space around it had such an effect that the ladies attending the experiment opened their parasols. ”

The first in Hungary to build an electric motor to utilise direct current was Ányos Jedlik in 1829, but he soon turned his attention to the new source of electric power, the as yet rather low-efficiency generator. His next invention, the dynamo, revolu29