Famous Hungarians

FAMOUS HUNGARIANS

Asbóth Sándor (1811–18­68)

* Keszthely – † Buenos Aires,
Argentina. Mérnök, a 1848-as Szabad­ságharc ezredese; az amerikai polgárhá­ború tábor­nagya. USA-nagy­követ Uru­guay­ban és Argentinában.
Elkészítette New York városren­dezési ter­vét és a híres Central
Parkot ő tervezte meg; ő alkal­mazott először bitument járda­bur­kolásra.

Jenő Barnóthy (1904 – 1996)

* Kassa, Hungary – † Chicago, Illinois, USA
Professor Barnóthy, astro- and nucle­ar physicist, emigrated to the United States with his wife and fellow scientist, Magda Forró in 1948. They first taught physics at the Barat College in Forest Lakes, Illinois. In 1955, they were comm­isi­oned to direct a compa­ny which manufac­tured radiologi­cal research equipment. Barnóthy became president of the Biomag­netic Research Foundation and director of the Forro Science Co. He held numer­ous patents regard­ing the manufacture of equip­ment for the explo­ration of radiation. Sev­eral hundred of his scientific articles were published re­garding cosmic radia­tion, astro-, nuclear- and biophys­ics. His last article, co-authored with his wife (What is Time?) was published in 1991. Both Barnó­thy’s and Forró’s achi­evments were outstanding in re­search­ing the phenom­e­na of cos­mical radiation – a prerequisite for conquer­ing the uni­verse.

József Dallos (1905 – 1979)

* Hungary – † London, England
Dallos, a physician, developed the process for preparing molds from the living eye after dis­covering the necessary materials. It was his research, that made the manu­facture of contact lenses which fit the shape of the living eye possi­ble for the first time in the world in 1929. Such lenses could be worn all day. Dallos creat­ed the fluid­less contact lens as well. In 1937 he moved to London and worked there. Since his death in 1979, the British Contact Lens Association anual­ly dis­trib­utes awards named after Dallos.
The Hungarian István Győrffy is credited with the development of the soft contact lense.

Árpád Dékáni (1861 – 1931)

* Alsójára, Transylvania, Hungary – † Bor­bánd, Transylvania
Dékáni, art teacher and designer, pas­sionat­ly collected and cataloged Hungarian motifs. He designed a new, original and artistic Hun­garian  needlepoint lace, the well-known Halas Lace. It was the first characteristically Hungarian nee­dlepoint lace. The realization of Dékáni’s con­ceptions and de­signs, the Halas Lace, soon became popular abroad. Hun­gary’s Department of Religion and Education commisioned Dékáni to organize lace making cours­es. With this, the Hungarian handicraft movement took its begin­ning.

Lajos Döme and András Kézsmárki

Invention of 1999!
In 1999 Döme and Kézsmárki invented a meth­od for the utilization of raw rubber wastes. This was accomplished by separating reusable un­cured rubber from its reinforcement, using a mechanical procedure and a new machine. By applying this method, 70% of rubber wastes could be reused in manufacturing rubber prod­ucts. This invention won two gold, one silver medal and a special award at four international exhibitions for inven­tions.

István Dorogi (* Hungary, 1885 – ?)

Dorogi was a chemical engineer and inventor. Between 1929 and 1934, he developed a process for the industrial mass production of inflatable formes/figures made of rubber. For this proce­dure he obtained 52 Hun­garian and 150 inter­national patents. The solutions and methods he devel­oped are widely used in the modern rub­ber industry to manufacture inflat­able toys, boats, life-savers, etc.

P. Gyula Fényi, S.J. (1845 – 1927)

* Sopron, Hungary – † Kalocsa, Hungary
P. Fényi, astro-physicist and Jesuit friar, was the director of the Haynald Observatory at Kalocsa, Hungary. He was the first to rec­ognize the impor­tance of solar protuberanc­es. Fényi proved that the frequency of solar protuberanc­es varies according to the num­ber of sun spots. His meteo­rological and geophysical studies were also significant. A crater on the moon was named after him.

Pál Greguss (* Budapest 1921 – )

Greguss, chemical engineer and physicist invent­ed the Pál-Optic. This invention is a panoramic lens and is among the instru­ments of the space probe launched within the Deep Space Program. While it takes the Sojourn­er 6000 photographs to assemble a panorama picture, the Pál-Optic is able to do so in ONE. This lens provides a 360° vision of the Earth, the Sun and the Moon simultaneously, and therefore it can be used to deter­mine the exact location of the space probe.

Ágoston Haraszty (1812 – 1869)

* Futak, Hungary – † Corinto, Nicaragua
Haraszty, landowner, was the founder of the Am­erican grape culture, and is identified as the Father of California Wine Industry. He intro­duced the Zin­fan­del red wine grape and the
Muscat of Alexandria. In 1861 he import­ed 100 000 grapevines from Eu­rope. The world famous Hun­garian Tokaj grapes were among the 1,400 varieties. His book, pub­lished in 1862: Grape Culture, Wines and Wine Making with Notes upon Agriculture and Horticul­ture, remained the wine making classic authority in the English language for a century. Haraszthy also invented an effi­cient gold refining process.

Mór Kaposy (1837 – 1902)

* Kaposvár, Hungary – † Vienna, Austria
Kaposy, physician and dermatologist, conduct­ed significant research in the fields of malignant tumors and veneral diseases. He determined the Sarco­ma indiopathicum multiplex haemorrhagi­cum (1872), known today as Kapo­sy’s Sarcoma, a cancerous sarcoma often associated with AIDS. This form of skin cancer is often the first symptom of AIDS.

János Kemény (1926 – 1992)

* Budapest – † Etna, New Hampshire, USA
Kemény, mathematician and professor, moved to the United States in 1940. He was drafted at the age of 17, and as a brilliant mathematician was as­signed to the Manhattan Project, a pro­ject which was designated to research nuclear ener­gy. He chaired the mathe­matics department at Dart­mouth College, and from 1970 to 1981 he was the president of this school. He is the co-inventor of the BASIC programming lan­guage, and is there­fore considered the father of microcomputing. In 1983 he founded his own company, named True Basic Inc. He was first to introduce the idea of e-mail.

Manhattan Project

In 1939 Leo Szilárd and Edward Teller asked Einstein to alert President Roosevelt that Ger­man scientists were probably constructing an atomic bomb. Teller translated Einstein’s Ger­man letter into English and brought it to the White House personally. In a few weeks, the Manhattan Project sci­entific team started nu­clear research under the direction of five nucle­ar physicists, headed by the Italian Enrico Fer­mi. The others were Fermi’s famous Martians, otherwise known as Hungarians: dr. John von Neumann, dr. Leo Szilárd, dr. Edward Teller and dr. Eugene Wig­ner. The results of the Manhattan Pro­ject were outstanding: the chain reaction of atomic fission was discovered, the first nuclear reactor began working and the atomic bomb was built. When the research group learned that the Supreme Com­mand of the Unit­ed States planned to drop an atomic bomb on Japan, they sent a letter of protest to presi­dent Tru­man, together with several fellow scientists, but to no avail.

André Kertész (1894 – 1985)

* Budapest – † New York
Kertész, world famous photographer, was one of the founders of photo­jour­nalism. Already in 1912, he documented life on the streets and people in their natural environments with pho­tographs. He lived and worked in Paris from 1925 and in New York from 1936. Kertész pioneered in the popu­lariza­tion of the use of the small format camera. He worked almost exclusively with small cameras throughout his life. Completely self taught, Kertész always consid­ered him­self an amateur: I am an ama­teur and I intend to remain an amateur for the rest of my life. The photograph gets its beauty from the very truth with which it is stamped. This is why I guard myself against any kind of profes­sional trickery or virtuosity…

József Kliegl (1795 – 1870)

* Baja, Hungary – † Budapest
As a mechanical engineer and inventor, Kliegl had countless inventions. Some of these are: a typesetter with keyboard (1840), calculator, harvest­ing machine, a steam locomotive that could be used on mo­un­tainous terrain and could be stopped at any point of an inclined track; a mono­rail which transported and laid its own rail tracks, and a musical nota­tion record­ing machine (1856). This last inven­tion was a machine atached to a piano, which immediately wrote down the notes (improvised composi­t­ions) struck on the piano on a paper roll con­veyed by a clock machinery.

Sándor Kőrösi Csoma (1784 – 1842)

* Kőrösfalva, Transylvania – † Darjeeling, India
Kőrösi Csoma, a linguist, globetrotter and ex­plorer, studied oriental languag­es in Göttingen, Germany. He set out on foot to Asia, to find the ancient homeland and origins of the Hun­garians. He spoke 20 languages and com­piled a glossary of 16 European and Oriental languag­es. Suffering un­imag­inable privations, he lived and studied in lama monasteries and laid down the founda­tions of the Tibetan language. Kőrösi Csoma prepared the first grammar in­dex of the Tibetan language and the first Eng­lish-Tibetan dictio­nary. Two of his works were published in Calcutta, India: Grammar of the Tibetan Lan­guage, and Essays towards a Dictio­nary Tibetan and English. These works are re­garded as mile­stones in Orien­tal linguistics. His San­skrit-Ti­betan-English Dictionary was pub­lished after his death. The first Buddhist monu­ment of Europe, the Csoma-Stupa was unveiled in Bu­dapest in 1982.

Mária Markovits (1875 – 1954)

* Kiskunhalas – † Kiskunhalas, Hungary
Árpád Dékáni’s artistic Hungarian Halas Lace designs could not be made with the centuries old, traditional methods. It was Mária Marko­vits, embroi­derer and artist, through whom Dékáni’s designs became reality. Markovits developed a new, unique and original technique of needle-point­ing for the Halas Lace. She educated generations of lace embroiderers. The world famous Halas Lace, which is entirely handmade, is also known as the Gold of Kiskun­halas.

John von Neumann (1903 – 1957)

* Budapest, Hungary – † Washington, DC
Von Neumann, mathematician, chemist and physicist, is the legendary sym­bol of quick and logical thinking. His fellow scientists character­ized him this way: Most scientists invent what they are able to, Neu­mann (invents) what he chooses to. At the age of 23 he was already a uni­versity professor in Berlin, Germany. He laid down the mathematical foun­dations of quantum mechanics and new branches of mathematics, con­ceived the theory of games and its economic application, and developed the theory of contin­u­ous geometry. During and after World War II, von Neu­mann served as a consultant to the armed forces. He took part in the devel­opment of the first atomic bomb as a member of the Manhattan Project scientific team. Compli­cated mathematical relationships had to be calcu­lat­ed in study­ing the shock waves produced by testing the atomic and hydrogen bombs. This led von Neu­man to develop a high speed elec­tronic com­puter. He in­vented the logical basic con­cepts of the com­puter, such as the binary code – the basic element of modern com­puter opera­tions – memo­ry, program stor­age and the com­mand system. In 1955, he was ap­point­ed to the Atomic Energy Commission. He gave the fol­lowing warning regarding atomic energy to the senate subcommittee: The combination of nucle­ar physics with irre­sponsible or rude poli­tics is already able to cause terrible wounds in society. With even the slight­est progress, … this same combina­tion of physics and politics will turn the Earth uninhabit­able.

Ábrahám Géza Pattantyús (1885 – 1956)

* Selmecbánya, Hungary – † Budapest
Pattantyús, mechanical engineer, taught at the Technical University of Buda­pest from 1907 to his death at the departments of electrotechnics and me­chanical and structural engineer­ing. Pattantyús was the educator of genera­tions of engineers and founder of the so-called „Pattan­tyús School”. He wrote 13 technical books and 150 technical articles. The process of design for sizing the airtank for reciprocating cylinder pumps is known throu­ghout the world as the Pattan­tyús-method.

Ferenc Pávlics (1928 – )

* Balozsameggyes, Hungary –
Pávlics, mechanical engineer, worked as a re­searcher at the headquaters of the armored vehicle arsenal of the US army in Detroit, at the de­fense research laboratory of General Motors and at the electron­ics division of the Santa Barbara Plant. He conducted research regarding the improve­ment of vehi­cles designed to travel on rough terrain and the use of vehi­cles de­sign­ed for travel on the surface of the Moon. He developed for NASA the first vehi­cle in history which traveled on extraterres­trial terrain, the moon rover, used on the Moon by the Apollo 11 expedition in 1969. The rover, known as Newcomer, was improved by NASA under Pávlics’ direc­tion, and land­ed on Mars in 1997 with the space probe named Trailfinder.

Eszter Pécsi (1898 – 1975)

* Kecskemét, Hungary – † New York, USA
Eszter Pécsi, structural engineer, was the first woman to receive a de­gree in engineer­ing in Hungary (1920). She prepared the structural design for the indoor swimming pool on St. Mar­git Island (Budapest, Hun­gary), and the first iron-framed tall building of Budapest, the Hos­pital on Fiume út. In 1957 she had to leave Hungary, and worked in Vienna, Austria for a year where she designed the city’s first multi-level parking garage. From 1958 she lived and worked in New York. She was the structural designer of the first rein­forced-concrete skyscra­per (Hotel Americana) and two skyscrapers erect­ed for the professors of Columbia Univer­sity. For these three works, Pécsi received the year’s best structural engineering design award from New York City. She was also the structur­al designer of numerous buildings of New York University. She developed a special method to prepare the site of the foun­dation for the sky­scra­pers along the Hudson River, for which she was named the best structural engineer of the year.

Joseph Pulitzer (1847 – 1911)

* Makó, Hungary – † Charleston, SC, USA
Pulitzer, journalist, editor and pioneer of mod­ern journalism, founded the Pulitzer prize. He organized a collection for the erection of the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York. The fund he started covers the expenses for the statu­e’s lighting even today.

Miklós Rózsa (1907 – 1995)

* Budapest, – † Los Angeles, CA, USA
Rózsa, composer and conductor, publicly per­for­med his first original com­position at age 7. The classical music he composed was known through­out Europe. Rózsa began to write film scores in 1937. He signed contracts first with Sándor Korda, a Hungarian producer, living in London, England, then with the Metro-Gold­wyn-Mayer movie studio in Hollywood in 1948. Dur­ing his 40 year career he wrote scores for 93 motion pictures, including Holly­wood’s most well-known movies, such as El Cid, Ben Hur, Quo Vadis, The Jungle Book, Spell­bound, etc. Simultaneously, he taught film music com­posi­tion for 20 years at South California Uni­versity, which was the first such course in the USA. His classical music is performed through­out the world. Rózsa was the only composer who com­memorated the 1956 Hungari­an Freedomfight with an Overture to a Symphony Concert.

Ernő Rubik, Sr. (1910 – 1997)

* Pöstyén, Hungary – † Budapest
Rubik Sr., mechanical engineer, was the most famous Hungarian air­plane designer. Between 1935 and 1987 he designed 31 different types of sailing and sport airplanes, using his own pat­ented inventions. These inven­tions are signifi­cant through­out the world. By using alumi­num alloys he was able to design lightweight and inexpensive airplanes.

Ernő Rubik, Jr. (1944 – )

* Budapest, Hungary –
Rubik, architect and designer, created sever­al logic games, the most fa­mous one being the Rubik’s Cube or Magic Cube (1974). Enthusi­asts of the cube have orga­nized clubs, contests and world championships. The Rubik’s Cube
has entered the Museum of Mod­ern Art in New York City.

Béla Schick (1877 – 1967)

* Boglár, Hungary – † New York City
Schick, pediatrician, discovered the world fa­mous Schick Test, which deter­mines the de­gree of susceptibility to diphteria. He co-discov­ered with Clemens von Pirquet the new medical science of allergy. He was also the inventor of the Schick safety razor blade.

Charles Simonyi (* Budapest 1948 – )

Simonyi, computer programer, has been head design­er of Microsoft (the world’s largest soft­ware com­pany) since the early 1980’s. Simonyi de­signed such programs as Windows, Word for Windows, and Microsoft Excel. He also intro­duced a program identifier naming convention, the well known Hungar­ian notation. This is quite useful and valuable and helps progra­m­mers produce better code faster.

 Szilárd (1898 – 1964)

* Budapest – † La Jolla, California, USA
Szilárd, nuclear- and biophysicist, and with Edward Teller called the atten­tion of Einstein and president Roosevelt to the possibility of military use of nuclear fission. Szilárd was a mem­ber of the Manhattan Project scientific team, which dealt with the research of nuclear energy. The development of the chain reaction of nu­clear fission by combining uranium with graph­ite is associated to Szilárd’s name. He was first to use plutonium to bring about an atomic reaction. He designed and built together with Fermi the first nu­clear reactor. Throughout his life, Szilárd was against the military use of nu­clear energy. Ther­efore he found­ed an anti war coun­cil called Council to Abolish War. After World War II his main interest was in biology. He adap­ted the theoretical methods of physics to the use in every day life. and developed ra­dio­therapy, a new method for treating can­cer. Leo Szilárd is known as the father of biophysics.

Edward Teller (Budapest 1908 – )

Nuclear physicist Teller’s main field of research is thermonuclear reaction. He was a member of the Manhattan Project scientific team, and took part in developing the nuc­lear chain reaction and the first atomic bomb. He also had a lead­ing role in the building of the American hydro­gen bomb (1952), and is therefore called the father of the hydro­gen bomb. He had an impor­tant part in the devel­opment of subma­rine tor­pe­does and the formulation of Star Wars (the Unit­ed States missile defense sys­tem). Teller is strongly anti­com­munist and his scien­tific work regarding nuclear explosives signifi­cantly con­trib­uted to the United Sta­tes’ peac­eful victory of the Cold War and col­lapse of the Soviet Union.
During a visit to Paks, Hungary in 1991, profes­sor Edward Teller spoke about his new discov­ery, according to which there is only one language, and that is Hungarian.  (Mai Nap, Budapest, 1991­.9.)

News

Two fifteen year old Hungarian girls, Zsófia Bodó of Budapest and Berna­dett Gaál of Hód­mezővá­sárhely, will be part of NASA’s Mars-exploration pro­gram. They reached the highest results in their age group in a competi­tion orga­nized by the Plan­etary Society, an international organization. Out of the 10,000 youths from 44 countries who ap­plied, there were only 9 win­ners: 1 Amer­i­can, 1 Brazilian, 1 Pole, 1 Taiwan­ese, 3 Indians, and the 2 Hungarian girls. They will soon join the Mars exploration in the com­mand center in San Die­go. They will take part in the analysis of the photo­graphs taken by the Mars Glob­al Surveyor space probe, and will even be able to direct the space probe’s remote con­trol­led camera. Their task is to deter­mine the land­ing site for a future expe­dition in 2011. (American Hungarian People’s Voice, 2-23-2001)