Tivadar Puskás

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Tivadar Puskás (17 September 1844 Pest - 16 March 1893 Budapest) was a Hungarian inventor, telephone pioneer, inventor of the telephone exchange.

The Hungarian inventor Tivadar Puskas was born in Pest on 17 September 1844. His family was part of the Transylvanian nobility. Puskas studied law and later engineering sciences. After living in England and working for the Warnin Railway Construction Company he returned to Hungary. In 1873, on the occasion of the World Exhibition in Vienna, he founded the Puskas Travel Agency that was the fourth in the World and the first travel agency to be established in Central Europe.

After this he tried his fortune in America. In Colorado he opened up a mine and began to dig for gold. It was while he was in America that Puskas exposed the American inventor Keley as a fraud, who with his so-called "energy machine" swindled crowds of quillible spectators.

Puskas, in addition to being an entrepreneur, was an inventor of genius and was continuously puzzling over technical problems. He was working on his idea for a telegraph exchange when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. This led him to take a fresh look at his work and he decided to get in touch with the great American inventor Thomas Edison.

Puskas now began to concentrate on perfecting his scheme to build a telephone exchange. According to Edison, "Tivadar Puskas was the first person to suggest the idea of a telephone exchange". Puskas's idea finally became a reality in 1877 in Boston. It was then that the Hungarian word "hallom" "I hear you" was used for the first time in a telephone conversation when, on hearing the voice of the person at the other end of the line, an exultant Puskas shouted out in Hungarian "hallom". Thus, this word without the letter "m", i.e. "hallo/hello", that we now use every time we speak into a telephone receiver, has become part of the World's vocabulary.

In 1879 Puskas set up a telephone exchange in Paris, where he looked after Thomas Edison's European affairs for the next four years. In Paris he was greatly helped by his younger brother Ferenc Puskas (1848-1884), who later established the first telephone exchange in Pest.

In 1887 Tivadar Puskas introduced the multiplex switchboard, which was a revolutionary step in the development of telephone exchanges. His next invention was the "Telephone News Service" he introduced in Pest, which announced news and "broadcast" programmes and was in many ways the forerunner of the radio. According to a contemporary scientific journal, at the most 50 people could listen to Edison's telephone at the same time, but if a 51st person was connected up, none of the subscribers could hear anything. With Puskas's apparatus, by contrast, half a million people could clearly hear the programme coming from the exchange.

In 1890 Puskas was granted a patent for a procedure for carrying out controlled explosions, which was the forerunner of modern techniques. He experimented with this technology when he was working on regulating the Lower Danube.

Despite his many brilliant inventions, including the telephone news service, which was in use a full 30 years before the advent of radio, Tivadar Puskas did not win the public recognition he deserved. This was partly a result of his early death in 1893 before he had reached the age of fifty, and partly a result of his character—he was an inventor who worked through inspiration and his flights of fancy did not suit the hard-headed men of business. His name slipped into oblivion instead of receiving the fame and recognition that were his due.

[edit] External links

• http://www.geocities.com/bioelectrochemistry/puskas.html