Life is Stronger [antikvár]

The Hungárián Tungsram company (United Incandescent Lamp and Electric Co.) developed into the third largest lamp and radio tűbe factory in Europe after the first world war. It manufactured 40 millionen light bulbs, 3-4 millión radio tubes and 60 thousand radio receiving sets annually. Its production exceeded that of Francé and Great Britain quantitatively. Roughly 20% of Europe's totál consumption bore the Tungsram trademark. In Europe it was only surpassed by the Dutch Phillips Co. and the Germán Osram CO. The company maintained a research laboratory in Újpest (today part of Greater Budapest) with a staff of about 100, where valuable innovations were developed. One was the incandescent lamp with a metallic filament, the first in the world, and later, its main achievement, a gross crystal tungsten metál, which was used for the production of spiralized and double-spiral wires, the krypton lamp, and later the fluorescent lamp etc. There were similarly valuable patents for the production of radio tubes. I was a tenure physics professor at Hungary's second largest university when Lipót Aschner, the director of Tungsram, called on me and suggested that I take on the leadership of the factory's research laboratory. I hesitated, for in Hungary a professorship was associated with considerable prestige, and alsó because I did not wish to trade basic research for industrial experimentation. Aschner assured me, however, that I need not abandon basic research and I would have the opportunity to collaborate with the two foremost universities in the country, Pázmány Péter University in Budapest, and the Technical University, alsó in Budapest. Later, when I saw these proposals become reality, indeed Tungsram even created a chair of atomic physics at the Technical University for teaching and research, and the leadership of a research staff of 100 opened up new avenues for basic and applied research, my enthusiasm for the venture was whole-hearted and I defended it when that became necessary.