Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 2001

Tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven

people wanting to save money had to resort to more inventive solutions. They soaked the stamp off the letter and washed them to remove the postmark ink, or fit two stamps together (i.e. forged them together) in a manner that made it very difficult to notice where they were cut or torn.

Suspicious envelopes appeared all over the country, and comments on reused stamps also were received from postal services in the United States of America, France, Austria, and Romania. Since by the 1880s, stamp forgery was proved to be quite widespread, official correspondence on the matter grew significantly among stamp collectors who made the discoveries, post office managements, and the responsible ministry. Often they contained proposals on how to prevent the re-use of the stamps.

The current study relies on portions of letters on forged stamps from the Stamp Museum archive to present measures employed to prevent the re-use of stamps issued between 1889 and 1910, and decrees on the subject and ways of sanctioning forgers on both domestic and international scale.

Sadly, the postal services still face stamp forgers and no effective method has been found to filter them out. While automated handling has simplified postal operations, it does not screen out forgeries. At present, re-use of used stamps does not qualify as forgery, but as fraud at the expense of the post office. However, it continues to be a criminal offence.

Mrs. Gergely Kovács: Endre Magyari’s “Postal Radio”

Postal engineer Endre Magyari, PhD (1900-1968) began his postal service in 1922 at the Postal Experimental Station, where he was the first to design a high-performance radiotelephone transmitter. A 1 kW transmitter he designed was built on the island of Csepel near Budapest. He was involved in the design, construction, and start-up of numerous other transmitters, including a Huth transmitter, which went into operation in 1923.

When Hungarian radio first went on the air in December 1925, Endre Magyari, who was 26-years-old, prepared a draft report on the institution of post office-supplied radio receivers for deputy general manager of technology Endre Kolossváry. It was focused on creating a mass audience for radio by leasing detector receivers for a fee so modest that even low-income people could afford them. The proposal for the mass receiver was never carried out. As a result, Hungarian Radio, which began operation in 1925 with 17,000 subscribers, had only managed to increase its listening audience to 328,000 subscribers by 1933. In other words, only 3.7% of the public had receivers. Over these years the number of subscribers remained at a standstill and in fact, in 1932 it dropped by 0.9%. Knowing that, it wasn’t surprising that Endre Magyari came up with a new plan in 1933, to offer radio receivers to private persons. He called the institution postal-radio. In it he concluded that the main obstacles to the spread of radio were that most of the country wasn’t equipped for electricity and that dissemination policies hadn’t changed at all since 1925.

The proposal for the postal-radio in 1933 fell just as flat as the 1926 idea. In 1938, Magyari came up with another six-page study called The Pragmatic History of the

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