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

Direct current versus alternating current

■ The engine room oh the Kelenhöld Central

spaces. As gas lighting required high quality gasifiable coal, which was increasingly difficult to import, while electricity was obtainable from the energy of domestically mined industrial coal, the burners of the inner-city gas lamps were gradually converted into electric lights and one plain 6o-watt bulb in a lamp bracket made of bent metal tubing after the other appeared on the walls of houses and fences. In the various households more and more electric appliances such as electric irons, water boilers, coffeemakers, cookers and heaters came to be used, but still not enough. The electricians entertained ideas of following the German example and opening a bureau to promote electric power. (It was only under the Soviet Republic of 1919 that the use of electricity stopped increasing as the electricity tariff was raised from 7 to 18 and then to 40 fillér, and perks were discontinued when a household consumed more than 3,000 kWh.)

At the end of the war the acquisition of the second private company, the BÁV Rt, was also imminent. The transaction was in fact concluded on 1 April 1918, at a considerable price. And on top of that, as soon as ownership had been transferred to the municipality of Budapest, a generator exploded in the Tutaj utca plant causing 2.5 million koronás' worth of material damages.

After World War I some of the network fed from the overloaded Váci utca plant was taken over by Kelenföld but as it generated three-phase current at a voltage

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