A few weeks back, I taught a Master Writing course for an adult education program. One of the students sent me an e-mail saying he lent out my hand-outs to a co-worker and she lost them. He wanted me to e-mail him what I distributed once again. At the bottom of his e-mail was a video about Budapest and Hungarian inventors. I thought it was quite interesting to see which things I knew Hungarians were responsible for and which were new surprises. The helicopter was the only one I was not aware of. One question in my mind is which of these inventors invented these things while still in Hungary or after they left for a new homeland? The Biro pen was patented in Paris in 1938. The Biro brothers fled to Argentina in 1943 to escape the Germans.
There seems to be some confusion over the invention of the helicopter. Hungarian sources give credit to Oszkár Asbóth as the inventor, while other sources credit many others with models and prototypes, but the credit of successfully building the first working model goes to...drum roll please...Russian born Igor Sikorsky. He has been called the "Father of the helicopter".
If you want to prove or disprove other parts of the video, you are on your own. Either way, I think they put together a pleasant little piece of Budapest entertainment.
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