Tivadar Puskás | |
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| Born | Tivadar Puskás de Ditró (1844-09-17)17 September 1844 |
| Died | 16 March 1893(1893-03-16) (aged 48) |
| Other names | Theodore Puskás |
| Occupation | Inventor |
Tivadar Puskás de Ditró (in older English technical literature:Theodore Puskás)[1] (17 September 1844 – 16 March 1893) was aHungarianinventor,telephone pioneer, and inventor of thetelephone exchange.[2][3][4][5][6][7] He was also the founder ofTelefon Hírmondó.
The Puskás family fromDitró[8] (todayHarghita County ofRomania), was part of theTransylvanian Hungarian nobility. Puskás studied law and later engineering sciences. After living in England and working for theWarnin Railway Construction Company he returned toHungary. In 1873, on the occasion of the World Exhibition inVienna, he founded the Puskás Travel Agency, the fourth-oldest in the world[citation needed] and the first travel agency inCentral Europe. After this, Puskás moved toColorado and became a gold miner. It was while he was in America that Puskás exposed the American "energy machine" inventorKeely as a fraud.[citation needed]
Puskás was working on his idea for atelegraph exchange whenAlexander Graham Bell invented thetelephone. This led him to take a fresh look at his work and he decided to get in touch with the American inventorThomas Edison.
Puskás 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".[9][10][11][12] The first experimental telephone exchange was based on the ideas of Puskás, and it was built by theBell Telephone Company inBoston in 1877.[13]
On March 11, 1878, Puskas demonstrated the first working Edison phonograph from the US (using tinfoil) to the French Academy of Sciences. It was generally successful although he was also accused of "ventriloquism." He was responsible for having it manufactured (in limited quantities) by E. Hardy of Paris.
In 1879, Puskás set up a telephone exchange inParis, 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 Puskás (1848–1884), who later established the first telephone exchange inPest.
In 1887, he introduced themultiplexswitchboard, which was a revolutionary step in the further development of telephone exchanges.[14]
His next invention was the "Telephone News Service" that 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 most 50 people could listen to Edison's telephone at the same time, if one more person was connected, none of the subscribers could hear anything. With Puskás's apparatus, by contrast, half a million people could clearly hear the programme coming from the exchange.
In 1890, Puskás 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.
Puskás registered thepatent of technology behind thetelephone newspaperTelefon Hírmondó in 1892, in thePatent Office of theAustro-Hungarian Empire, with the title "A new method of organizing and fitting a telephone newspaper".[15] TheTelefon Hírmondó service started on 15 February 1893, with around 60 subscribers. After Puskás's death on 16 March 1893, his brother Albert Puskás sold the enterprise and the patent rights to István Popper.
Tivadar Puskás did not win extensive public recognition during his lifetime. However, in 2008, theHungarian National Bank issued a 1000 Forint commemorative coin in honor of Puskás and the 115th anniversary of the introduction of theTelefon Hírmondó.[16]
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Media related toTivadar Puskás at Wikimedia Commons
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