The Foundry Museum: Abraham Ganz and the Wheels of Europe
Why is it significant?
Stop at the gate on Bem József utca and look in at the old industrial hall behind it, sooty brick, heavy beams and the silhouette of a crane. It hardly looks like a sight. Yet a good part of modern Hungarian industry began in this one modest courtyard.
Key Facts
| Place | The Foundry Museum: Abraham Ganz and the Wheels of Europe |
|---|---|
| Address | Bem József utca 20, 1027 Budapest, Hungary |
| Geo Coordinates | 47.51150, 19.03560 |
| Part of Walk | Water Town Secrets: Budapest's Víziváros from Batthyány tér to Gül Baba's Rose Garden |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop at the gate on Bem József utca and look in at the old industrial hall behind it, sooty brick, heavy beams and the silhouette of a crane. It hardly looks like a sight. Yet a good part of modern Hungarian industry began in this one modest courtyard.
In the early 1840s a young Swiss iron founder called Abraham Ganz arrived in Buda, worked for a while in another man's foundry, and in 1844 opened a small workshop of his own here in the Water Town. Four years later came the revolution of 1848, and Ganz cast cannons and cannonballs for the Hungarian army, a choice that could have cost him dearly once the Austrians had won.
His fortune came from something much less dramatic: the railway wheel. Ganz perfected a technique called chilled casting, in which the molten iron cools so fast against the mould that the rim of the wheel becomes glass-hard while the core stays tough. Cheap, durable and strong, his wheels rolled under wagons across the Habsburg lands and far beyond, and they were sold by the tens of thousands.
Ganz himself did not live to see what his company became. He died in 1867, by his own hand, still in his early fifties. His successors, led by the engineer András Mechwart, turned the firm into a giant. In 1885 three Ganz engineers, Károly Zipernowsky, Miksa Déri and Ottó Bláthy, presented a practical transformer design that helped make long-distance electricity possible, and later Kálmán Kandó built pioneering electric locomotives for the company.
When the factory moved on, this original hall was kept, and in 1969 it opened as a foundry museum, with its old furnaces and ladles still in place. Imagine the roar and the orange glare in here, right behind the quiet streets of the Water Town. Now carry on down Bem József utca to the square at its end, where a bronze general is urging his soldiers forward.