Tivadar Puskás

Biography

The Puskás family from Ditró, part of the Transylvanian Hungarian nobility, had Tivadar study law and later engineering sciences. After living in England and working for the Warnin Railway Construction Company, he returned to Hungary. In 1873, at the World Exhibition in Vienna, he founded the Puskás Travel Agency, the fourth-oldest in the world and the first travel agency in Central Europe. He then moved to Colorado and became a gold miner, and while in America he exposed the American 'energy machine' inventor Keely as a fraud. Working on his idea for a telegraph exchange when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, Puskás took a fresh look at his work and contacted Thomas Edison. According to Edison, Puskás was the first person to suggest the idea of a telephone exchange. The first experimental telephone exchange, based on his ideas, was built by the Bell Telephone Company in Boston in 1877. On March 11, 1878, he demonstrated the first working Edison phonograph from the US to the French Academy of Sciences, though he was accused of ventriloquism. He had it manufactured in limited quantities by E. Hardy of Paris. In 1879 he set up a telephone exchange in Paris and looked after Edison's European affairs for four years, helped by his younger brother Ferenc Puskás, who later established the first telephone exchange in Pest. In 1887 he introduced the multiplex switchboard. His next invention, the Telephone News Service, introduced in Pest, announced news and broadcast programmes and was a forerunner of radio; with his apparatus, half a million people could hear the programme from the exchange.