Tivadar Puskás

Tivadar Puskás de Ditró (English: Theodore Puskás b. 17 September 1844, Pest – d. 16 March 1893, Budapest) was a Hungarian inventor, telephone pioneer, and inventor of the telephone exchange. He was also the founder of Telefon Hírmondó.

The Puskás family from Ditró today Harghita County of Romania, was part of the Transylvanian Hungarian nobility. Puskás studied law and later engineering sciences. After living in England and working for the Warnin Railway Construction Company he returned to Hungary. In 1873, on the occasion of 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. After this, Puskás moved to Colorado and became a gold miner. It was while he was in America that Puskás exposed the American "energy machine" inventor Keely as a fraud.

Puskás was working on his idea for a telegraph exchange when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. This led him to take a fresh look at his work and he decided to get in touch with the American inventor Thomas Edison.

Puskás now began to concentrate on perfecting his scheme to build a telephone exchange. According to Edison, "Tivadar Puskas was the first person to suggest the idea of a telephone exchange". The first experimental telephone exchange was based on the ideas of Puskás, and it was built by the Bell Telephone Company in Boston in 1877.

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