Hungarian National Committee for the IGY, Sopron, and the Pan-European Picnic

I recently bought an interesting item on eBay, one for which I was the sole bidder, so it was not very expensive. It was a sheet signed by the members of the Hungarian National Committee for the IGY. Countries participating in the IGY had national committees to organize and guide the work done by scientists from that country.

Members and signatures of the Hungarian National Committee for the IGY

I am assuming the officers were the key figures on this committee. Prof. A. Tározy-Hornoch is listed as academician, president of the committee, and representing the field of geodesy (shape and gravitational field of the Earth). Prof. L. Egyed is listed as secretary of the committee, representing the field of seismology. I found a little more information online about these two scientists.

Prof. A. Tározy-Hornoch (1900-1986) was a university professor in Sopron and one of the most prominent figures in 20th century Hungarian geodesy. He is the eponym for Hungary's Tárczy-Hornoch Antal Geodetic Laboratory, used for the development and calibration of geodetic instruments and devices. 

According to Wikipedia, Prof. László  Egyed  (1914-1970) was a professor at the Geophysical Institute of the Eötvös-University in Budapest. He published over 100 scientific articles. He wrote the book Physics of the Solid Earth in 1956; I don't think a translation exists, but it would be interesting to read this book to survey the field of geophysics just prior to the IGY. 

Egyed was a supporter of the expanding Earth hypothesis, a suggested alternative to plate tectonics. According to this post from Scientific American, Egyed based his thinking on variations of the sea level in the geological past, concluding that today's continents are the remains of the ancient crust of a smaller planet, surrounded by younger rocks generated along fractures at the mid-ocean-ridges. Popular Mechanics had an article describing expanding Earth ideas in more detail.

This document is reminiscent of my last post, about my one-page exhibit which included covers featuring three key personnel of the U.S. National Committee for the IGY: Joseph Kaplan (chairperson), A. H. Shapley (vice chairperson), and Hugh Odishaw (executive secretary).

I could not easily find much information on Hungary's activities as part of the IGY, but it did establish the Nagycenk Geophysical Observatory in 1956-57, operated during the IGY and since by the Geodetic and Geophysical Institute of the Earth Science Center, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The observatory makes continuous records of Earth electrical currents, atmospheric electricity, ionospheric and meteorological observations.

In 2009, I was at a geophysics conference in Tározy-Hornoch's Sopron, the XIth International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy (IAGA) Scientific Assembly. I sent myself a postcard prepared for the event. It is franked with what seems to be a somewhat standardized Hungarian postage stamp, similar to Scott 3926a, showing a surveying compass and map of Hungary. The word Belföld means domestic (I think), so other stamps were added to make the international postage. Magyarország is Hungarian for Hungary. The non-standardized label on the stamp margin gives the date and place of the IAGA meeting. There is a corresponding IAGA 2009 cancellation of the stamps. Maybe Prof. Tározy-Hornoch himself walked the halls of the conference building in an earlier era.

Front of self-addressed postcard from IAGA 2009, Sopron

Back of postcard from IAGA 2009, Sopron

While I was in Sopron, I took a wonderful bike ride into the countryside, where I saw the impressive Fertőrákos limestone quarry (photo at right). The quarry was used as early as Roman times, but nowadays there are concerts in an amphitheater among the cavernous excavations. This was also the area of the so-called Pan-European Picnic two decades earlier in 1989, the first place where East Germans on holiday were allowed to cross the border unimpeded into Austria and the West. Soon afterwards the Berlin Wall fell (I stood on top of it in the week before Christmas, 1989), and then everything else! 

This exhibit in Sopron commemorated the 20th anniversary of the Pan-European picnic

Once I got to the Neusiedler See on my bike ride, a cold beer really hit the spot