Hungary

Famous Hungarian People: Hungarian Artists, Scientists, Leaders, Musicians, Politicians and Athletes

Citizens of Hungary experienced a very long and tumultuous past, with their country coming into the hands of various rulers and getting exposed to different cultures. Despite the many upheavals in their country, Hungarians retained their ethnic culture and remained unique, slowly carving their own niche that made them stand out above the rest in different pursuits, whether it is creating a new form of self-defense to advancement in science and technology, creating games and writing instruments and giving the world timeless music, classic art masterpieces and world-class inventions. These famous people from Hungary worked tirelessly and meticulously to give the rest of the world a glimpse as to what Hungary and being Hungarian really means.

:: List of Famous People from Hungary ::

Franz Liszt
Composer, pianist, teacher and conductor Franz Liszt was born on the 22nd of October 1811. His father, who had German ancestry was a staunch Hungarian and would only speak the language in all his dealings. He too, was musically inclined and can play the piano, guitar, violin and cello and eventually taught his son to play the piano. Liszt’s first concert appearance was at age nine and he already showed so much promise that a number of sponsors were willing to support his musical education. He studied piano under Carl Czerny in Vienna and composition under Antonio Salieri. This jumpstarted his career in 1822 and he was able to meet noted composers such as Schubert and Beethoven. He traveled extensively and met more composers, artists and writers that shaped his career. He continued his performances, his compositions and transcriptions of the works of other composers. He eventually became a piano virtuoso and was considered to be the best during his time. The death of two of his children affected his health and caused him great sadness. After a lingering illness he finally succumbed to pneumonia on the 31st of July 1886 at the age of 74. Liszt’s most memorable piano work is called the Years of Pilgrimage or Années de pèlerinage.

Ernö Rubik
Born in Budapest on July 13, 1944, Ernö Rubik was an architect, inventor and an architecture professor who gave the world in 1974 the intriguing and sometimes frustrating mechanical puzzle, the Rubik’s Cube. His original invention was succeeded by, in chronological order, Rubik’s Magic, the master edition of Rubik’s Magic, Rubik Snake and finally, Rubik’s 360. Rubik’s mother was a poet and his father, also named Ernö was a flight engineer. The Rubik’s Cube was originally created when Ernö was trying to solve a structural problem on how to move parts independently without the whole system falling apart and as a tool to help his students in understanding 3D objects while he was teaching at the Academy of Applied Arts and Crafts. It was only when he tried to scramble and restore the cube that Ernö realized that he actually created a puzzle game. He applied for a Hungarian patent for it under the name Magic Cube.

János Irinyi
Although noted for his invention of the non-explosive and noiseless match, János Irinyi was a Hungarian chemist who did several researches on chemistry and wrote several papers on the actions and reactions of chemicals. Most of these papers paved the way for modern chemistry. He developed the idea of the noiseless match while attending the lecture and demonstration of his chemistry professor. His professor, Pál Meissner was demonstrating the capability of two chemicals, sulphur and lead-oxide to ignite by rubbing them together. However, the demonstration of his professor failed to produce the desired result. From that experiment, Irinyi substituted phosphor and eliminated potassium chlorate, the chemical that causes explosion. And the result was the precursor of the modern-day safety matches.

Kálman Kandó
His full name was Kálman Kandó de Egerfarmos et Sztregova and he was born on July 10, 1869. A mechanical engineer by profession, he worked first in France and gained exposure and experience in the design and development of the induction motor of Nikola Tesla. Kandó became known for the birth of the electric train when he was able to develop the “high-voltage three-phase alternating current motors” as well as generators for electric trains in 1894. He conducted his work and experimentation at the Ganz electric works factory in Budapest before he moved to Italy and worked on the Valtellina, which became the first electric locomotive in the world. For Hungary he developed a new system that did not rely on two overhead wires. He created the Kandó V40 that applied the theories of electrochemistry and electromechanics. Kandó died on January 13, 1931 but his legacy lives on.

László Bíró
László József Bíró hailed from Budapest where he was born on the 29th of September 1899. His claim to fame was the invention of the modern day ballpoint pen that has become one of the most popular writing instruments. Biró was a journalist and he was observant enough to notice that the printer’s ink used in printing newspapers was quick-drying and did not smudge. He tried to emulate that by using the same type of ink in fountain pens but the ink was too thick and viscous to flow smoothly from the pen’s tip. He was not deterred and worked with his chemist brother on creating a new type of ink. Biró on the other hand devised a new pen tip with a very small ball inside a socket that rotated freely while picking up ink inside the cartridge. As the ball rolled while writing on paper, ink was deposited. In 1938 they applied for a patent for their new writing instrument in Paris. To avoid prosecution from the Nazis who were then ruling over Hungary, the brothers fled to Argentina in 1943 and applied for another patent as well as started a pen factory to manufacture their ballpoint pens. The product became known as birome. The pen became an instant hit and was even used by the British Royal Air Force. The owner of Bic, Marcel Bich bought the patent from Biro in 1950. Biro is still a registered trademark.

Zoltán Lajos Bay
Zoltán Bay was born in Gyula on July 24, 1900. He was a trained physicist and engineer. He worked with Gyorgy Szigeti at the Tungsram Ltd. Research laboratory in 1923 where they made improvements on electric bulbs. The two worked together on fluorescent and metal-vapor lamps and were able to produce the precursors of the LED or light-emitting diodes and the tungsten lamps. Zoltán Bay also developed the electron multiplier, which he finished developing while teaching at the George Washington University in the United States in 1948. He also engineered the development of microwave technology.

Imre Lichtenfeld
Imre or Imi Lichtenfeld was born in Budapest on May 26, 1910. His father was a chief inspector of the Bratislava police force in Slovakia. His father, also a self-defense instructor owned a gym where Imi used to train as a wrestler and boxer. He was a member of the national wrestling team of Slovakia. Imi became exposed to violence as Jews became targets of anti-Semitic riots. While traveling to Israel for a wrestling competition, he was unable to compete due to a broken rib he sustained while training. His exposure to the violence in the streets gave him a deeper understanding of the difference between sport and street fighting. He combined the two elements, that of not getting hurt while training and new self defense techniques applicable to street fighting. He used a combination of natural reactions and movements for defense and strengthened it with the application of quick but decisive counterattack moves. This new style that Imi developed became known as Krav Maga that is being employed by the elite units of the Israeli army for their combat training.

Albert Fonó
Dr. Albert Fonó was a mechanical engineer who was born in Budapest on July 2, 1881. A 1903 graduate of József Technical University, he was one of the pioneers of ramjet (previously called an air-jet engine) and turbojet propulsion engines. He obtained the first patent for a ramjet engine in 1932. He conducted several researches and experimentations in the field of energetics and held many patents including one for an air compressor applicable to mining operations and a steam boiler. Fonó also had a solution for increasing the range of artillery projection which he submitted but was not accepted by the Austro-Hungarian Army. After the First World War, he got a patent for his ramjet engine, which he described as suitable for supersonic high-altitude aircraft.

In 1960 he was officially acknowledged as the inventor of the jet engine after the American Rocket Society reviewed his patents. Albert Fonó became a corresponding member of the International Academy of Astronautics in 1968.

Baron Lóránd Eötvös de Vásárosnamény
Minister of Education, professor and physicist Dr. Baron Loránd Eötvös was born in Buda on July 27, 1848. His father was a liberal politician, a writer and also a poet. Eötvös, who studied law before switching to physics, was educated in Königsberg and Heidelberg in Germany. After earning his doctorate degree he returned to Hungary to teach at a Budapest university. He first gained international recognition with his work on capillarity, which is the ability of liquid to flow against the pull of gravity such as in narrow spaces and in porous and non-porous materials. He also did extensive research and experiments related to gravitation and surface tension. A version of the torsion balance called the Eötvös pendulum, although not patented, was developed by Eötvös to measure the density of underlying rock layers. It was a very sensitive instrument that was able to measure the direction of the force of gravity, the extent of change of the gravitational force over a surface and was able to determine the distribution of the layers of the earth’s crust. An acceleration unit called eotvos, used in the centimeter-gram-second system of units (CGS) was named after him. His pendulum was instrumental in the discovery of some of the richest oilfields in the United States and was even used by Albert Einstein as a tool for his theory of relativity.

Béla Viktor János Bartók
Bela Bartok, born in Nagyszentmiklós on March 25, 1881 was considered as one of Hungary’s greatest composers. He was noted for his analytical study and collection Hungarian folk music, as well as folk music from different countries. His mother said that he showed his musical talents at a very early age and was able to play about 40 pieces on the piano by the time he was four years old. He was only seven when his father died and his mother took her family to live first in Ukraine and then in Slovakia. By age nine Bartok was already giving his first recital. His music became influenced by Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy and Johannes Brahms. Bartok married twice and his only opera, Bluebeard’s Castle was dedicated to his first wife, Márta Ziegler. After 15 years he divorced Marta and married piano student Ditta Pásztory. He composed his first ballet, The Wooden Prince between 1914 and 1916 and his other ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin years later. His views on the Nazis made him and his wife flee to the United States. There he continued to write and give performances but he was not recognized as a composer, although it was in the United States that he composed one of his greatest works, the Concerto for Orchestra. He died of complications caused by leukemia at the age of 64 on September 26, 1945. Initially interred in New York, his two sons, Bela III and Peter together with the Hungarian government requested the transfer of his remains to Budapest in the late 1980s. And on July 7, 1988 Bartok was given a state funeral in his native land.

Edward Teller
He was born on January 15, 1908 in Budapest, Hungary. A theoretical physicist, Edward Teller made several contributions to molecular, surface and nuclear physics as well as spectroscopy. Teller was part of the Manhattan Project, the research and development program that produced the first atomic bomb during the Second World War. Consequently, Teller became known as the originator of the hydrogen bomb. He was also part of the trio that discovered the BET equation, a theory that explains the physical adsorption of gas molecules on a solid surface to determine a specific area’s surface measurement. BET stands for the initials of the last names of its three discoverers, Stephen Brunauer, Paul Hugh Emmett and Edward Teller.

Teller was educated in Germany and published his first paper on Hydrogen Molecular Ion. In 1941 he was part of the Manhattan Project development team. It was a race to develop the first atomic bomb to beat the Germans. Teller calculated and assured the team that the destruction that would be created by the atomic bomb will be confined to a small area. He led the team at Los Alamos for the creation of the hydrogen bomb although the research and development subsequently slowed down after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He left Los Alamos in 1945 and taught at the University of Chicago but was recalled in 1949 to Los Alamos to continue the research on the H-bomb. Full development and testing of the hydrogen bomb was approved by President Harry S. Truman of the United States on January 31, 1950. From 1975 Teller was a senior research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute for the Study of War, Revolution and Peace. At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory he held the position of Director Emeritus. He died at the age of 95 in Stanford, California on September 9, 2003.

Eugene Fodor
At a very young age, travel guide writer Eugene Fodor was already moving about. He was born in Leva, Hungary on October 14, 1905. He grew up in Czechoslovakia and received his education in England. It was said that he found the travel guides published during his time very boring and so he decided to write his own. His first travel guide was entitled “On the Continent – The Entertaining Travel Annual,” which was published in 1936. He got married to a Czech national but became a US citizen and enlisted in the US Army during the Second World War. He served at the Office of Strategic Services that was stationed in Europe. By 1949 Fodor had already established his company, Fodor’s in Paris, France and published Fodor Modern Guides, initially from his office in Paris but later transferred it to Litchfield in Connecticut. His company had published more than 400 travel guides and 14 different travel series to suit every type of traveler. He was the only travel editor to be elected to the World Travel Congress Hall of Fame of the American Society of Travel Agents.

Harry Houdini
Erik Weisz was his true name. He was born in Budapest on March 24, 1874. At age four he and his family migrated to the United States. Rabbi Dr. Mayer Samuel Weiss, his father, became the first rabbi of the new congregation in Appleton, Wisconsin. He had six other siblings. His name was later changed to Ehrich Weiss and his friends called him Harry or Ehrie. The young Weiss began performing as a trapeze artist at age 9. He was good in track and swimming and was very aware of how to keep in shape. This proved handy when he became a magician and escape artist. He said he was inspired by French magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, and borrowed that name to become Harry Houdini. He wowed audiences with his magic tricks and later with his elaborate productions of his “great escapes,” the first of which was his handcuffs act. It was an extraordinary feat that even left the members of Scotland Yard baffled. He later abandoned the act when imitators began to surface and moved on to more dangerous acts, and enjoined viewers to devise traps for him to escape from.

One of his famous acts was the “Chinese Water Torture Cell” where he was suspended upside down inside a locked water filled glass and metal cabinet where he had to escape after three minutes. While other magicians and escape artists kept mum on their trade secrets, Houdini often revealed how he did some of his escape acts. He said sometimes he hid lock picks, swallowed and regurgitate small keys or applied force and other methods to open locks. He also pioneered the Milk Can Escape and other daring escape routines.

After a performance in 1926 at the Princess Theater in Montreal, Canada, he was taking a breather and someone was sketching him. A McGill University student, J. Gordon Whitehead, came into the dressing room and asked Houdini if it was true that he can take blows to his stomach and Houdini replied in the affirmative. The student promptly delivered several strong punches onto Houdini’s stomach before he had time to tense his muscles to avoid serious injury. It turned out that Houdini was already suffering from acute appendicitis at that time but refused treatment. He was running a fever when he performed at Detroit, Michigan’s Garrick Theater on October 24, 1926 and was brought to Grace Hospital after his performance. Houdini died one week later due to peritonitis from a burst appendix. The doctors said that the appendix would have burst eventually but the blows he received on his stomach exacerbated the situation.

George Soros
Philanthropist, investor and business magnate George Soros was born in Budapest on August 12, 1930. His father, Tivadar Soros was a writer using Esperanto and he taught his son to speak Esperanto since childhood. Because they were Jews, they were doubly cautious of their religious roots especially during the time that the Nazis occupied Hungary. One of the ways he survived was to pose as a godson of a government employee from the Ministry of Agriculture who took a liking to him and gave him shelter. Soros was able to survive the Battle of Budapest. He migrated to England in 1947 and his education at the London School of Economics was financed by his uncle. He earned a degree in philosophy in 1952 and became a working student while continuing his studies and received financial aid from a charity through the help of a university tutor. His first real job was with Singer and Friedlander, a merchant bank in London. He moved to the United States in 1956 and became an arbitrage trader and analyst and developed his philosophy of reflexivity. However he soon realized that he cannot make money with his concept unless he actually made investments and went on to learn the inner machinations of investment deals. He learned the ropes while working for Arnold and S. Bleichroder, where he rose to become its vice-president from 1963 to 1973. He was able to persuade the company to open an offshore investment fund. He later went private to open his own investment company that evolved into the Quantum Fund based in Curacao. In 1969 he founded the Soros Fund Management, a private hedge fund management company and now one of the most profitable firms in the industry. George Soros is labeled as the man who broke the Bank of England because he made more than one billion US dollars in profit during the Black Wednesday UK currency crisis way back in 1992. Soros never forgot all the charity aid that he received when he was struggling to make ends meet and has given more that US$8 billion to different charitable institutions in different countries. He also made significant contributions during the transition of Hungary from communism to capitalism and pledged an endowment of 420 million euros to Budapest’s Central European University. According to Forbes.com, George Soros ranks 46th in the list of world billionaires and has a net worth of US$41.5 billion.

John von Neumann
Polymath, physicist and computing pioneer John von Neumann was born in Budapest on December 28, 1903. He was a genius and can already divide 8-digit numbers in his head by age six and learned calculus when he was eight. At 11 years of age he can memorize phone book entries. He enrolled at the University of Budapest in 1921 to study mathematics and at the same time enrolled at the University of Berlin to learn chemistry. He achieved this by not attending his mathematics lectures and still managed to earn high marks. He earned his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Budapest in 1926 as well as his diploma in chemical engineering from the Technische Hochschule in Germany. Von Neumann became a visiting lecturer at Princeton University in 1930 and a full time professor in 1931.

He was part of the team that developed the stored program computer and developed the binary code and the game theory. His involvement in the development of the nuclear power, weapons and artillery in the United States was enormous. He was a consultant in the Manhattan Project, a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee, Ballistic Research Laboratories, the Navy Bureau of Ordnance, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory consultant, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, Air Force Strategic Missiles Evaluation Committee, chairman of the Atlas Scientific Advisory Committee and was a director of the Atomic Energy Commission. His most lasting legacy was his “Von Neumann machines,” the basic computer architecture that is still being used today in building super computers, mobile phones and everything that has to do with computing. He succumbed to pancreatic cancer on February 8, 1957.

Oszkár Asbóth
Aviation engineer Oszkár Asbóth was born in Pankota, now part of Romania on March 31, 1891. He studied under the tutelage of Tódor von Kármán, who developed supersonic flight. Together with his teacher, and fellow engineers Vilmos Zurovetz and István Petróczy, they designed the helicopter in 1917. After several experiments to perfect the design, he was able to develop the Asbóth-helicopter and the model AH-1 successfully passed its demonstration on September 9, 1928. The helicopter model was able to ascend from the ground and lift vertically to a great height at great speed and was able to perform stationary hovering, a first-time achievement for a helicopter. His propeller designs were also utilized in different types of airplanes that were used during the First World War.

Tivadar Puskás
Inventor Tivadar Puskás was born in Pest on September 17, 1844. He first studied law before taking up engineering services in college. He then worked for the Warnin Railway Construction Company in England before he went back home. For the World Exhibition in 1873 hosted by Vienna, he founded the Puskás Travel Agency, the first travel agency in Central Europe and the fourth oldest in the world. He was toying with the idea of a telegraph exchange during the time that the telephone was co-invented by Alexander Graham Bell. He was already in the United States then, living in Colorado as a gold miner.

He got in touch with Thomas Edison for his carbon microphone invention and started skewing his work towards the building of a telephone exchange. By 1877 Puskás and Edison had corroborated for the first telephone exchange and set up one in Paris by 1879. His brother on the other hand set up the first telephone exchange in Pest. His partnership with Edison was lasting and he became the inventor’s representative. He obtained the patent for Edison’s phonograph in London by 1877 and managed all the European affairs of Edison. By 1887, he was able to set up the first multiplex switchboard. Later he introduced the telephone news service in his home country. In a way it became the forerunner of the radio, announcing news and programs. In 1892 he registered the patent for a telephone newspaper service, Telefon Hirmondo and it officially started its service as a telephone newspaper on February 15 1893. A month and a day after this, Puskas died, leaving his affairs to his brother.

Tódor von Kármán
He was accorded the distinction of being called the father of supersonic flight for his aircraft inventions. Tódor von Kármán was born on May 11, 1881 in Budapest. He was an aerospace engineer as well as a physicist who mainly worked in the field of astronautics and aeronautics. He received his engineering degree from the Royal Joseph Technical University (Budapest University of Technology and Economics) and his doctorate degree in 1908 from the University of Göttingen in Germany.

He was the chief of research of the Austro-Hungarian army’s aviation corps during the First World War and was part of the team that developed the world’s first helicopter. He was one of the founders of Luftwaffe of Germany and an adviser to the Junkers airplane company after WWI.

Like many of the Jews he became unsettled by the developments in Europe and accepted the job offer to be the director of the California Institute of Technology and the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory in 1930. He became one of the founders for space research of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and made significant contributions to the development of the Atlas, Minuteman and Titan rockets and the B-36, B-47, B-52 aircrafts. He was also a scientific advisor to the community of scientists and engineers in the field of aerodynamics, space flights, aeronautics, airplane design and astronautics. Von Kármán was awarded the first National Medal of Science by President John F. Kennedy in 1962. The Von Kármán craters on Mars and the moon were named in his honor. He died on May 7, 1963. He was never married.

:: References ::
http://www.traveltohungary.com/english/articles/type.php?type=famous_people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hungarians