Outstanding Hungarian inventions – An unusual video on Hungarian excellence

Graphic designer Gábor Filkor has created a pop-up book featuring some of the most notable Hungarian scientists and engineers, whose inventions and significant contributions to their field made a mark on the world.

The ‘inventive’ video showcasing the book in action was created as a commercial for the fictitious Rubik’s Museum. According to index.hu, there have indeed been plans to build a Rubik’s Cube-shaped museum in Budapest, which would exhibit Hungarian inventions, although the idea has not been realised yet. It does, however, have a great commercial already. Check out this video:

To see more of Gábor Filkor’s work, check out his website.

A short guide to the inventors and their inventions featured in the video:

Jedlik Ányos – szódavíz – carbonated water
Although artificially manufactured carbonated water has been around since the 1760s, the foreign methods of production were kept secret. Ányos Jedlik is credited with manufacturing and popularizing carbonated water in Hungary in 1826. He was also the inventor of the electric motor and the dynamo.

Irinyi János – zajtalan gyufa – noiseless match
János Irinyi invented the noiseless and non-explosive match in 1836, at the age of 19. This became his most well known invention, although he greatly contributed to the spreading of modern chemistry in Hungary as well. He also had a significant political role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.

Puskás Tivadar – telefonközpont – telephone exchange
According to the American inventor, Thomas Edison, “Tivadar Puskas was the first person to suggest the idea of a telephone exchange”. The first experimental model was built in Boston in 1877, based on the plans of Puskás. Later, he also invented the multiplex telephone switchboard, which contributed a further step in the development of communication.

Bíró László József – golyóstoll – ballpoint pen
After noticing that newspaper ink, unlike the ink used in fountain pens, dried quickly and left no smudges, Bíró devised a pen which had a ball in the tip that carried the thicker ink from the cartridge to the paper. Although the idea of a ballpoint pen was not new, early attempts were unsuccessful, and Bíró managed to perfect the invention. The ballpoint pen was first presented in 1931, and is still widely referred to as a biro or biro pen in many countries.

Neumann János – „a számítógép atyja” – “the father of the computer”
John von Neumann, as he was known after moving to the US to teach at Princeton, made major contributions to many fields of science, most notably mathematics, physics, and computing. He was a key figure in the invention of the digital computer. His computer architecture, known as the von Neumann model is, to this day, the basis of modern computer design. He also worked on the Manhattan Project, together with Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd who was the first to discover that nuclear chain reactions are possible.