Charles Antalik

* Hidegpatak, January 28, 1843 – † Bratislava, June 20, 1905 / physicist, secondary school teacher ; ; He completed his secondary school studies in Levoča, Igló and Nagyvárad. He obtained a mathematics-physics and gymnasium teacher's qualification at the University of Budapest in 1867. He studied physics with Ányos Jedlik (Szímő) and mathematics with Ottó Petzval (Szepesbéla). In 1868–1870 he was a teacher at the Kaposvár high school, and in 1870–1874 at the Košice high school. He spent the following academic year, 1874/75, in Germany. He first attended the lectures of Hermann Helmholtz (1821–1894) in Berlin, then of Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (1811–1899) and Georg Hermann Quincke (1834–1924) in Heidelberg. Returning home, he taught at the Arad High School between 1875 and 1892. In 1892, he was appointed director of the Bratislava State High School. Death took him from this post. He was a typical research teacher who combined his pedagogical work with research and experimentation. He regularly reported on his observations and ideas in contemporary Hungarian and foreign journals. He was particularly interested in the figures formed by electric sparks and the “sound figures” produced on vibrating membranes. As Tibor Miroszlav Morovics, a Hungarian historian of science from the Highlands (®Vágsellye), stated: “he became an artist of Lichtenberg-like electric dust figures”. Loránd Eötvös (1848–1919), the greatest Hungarian physicist, was somewhat condescending in a private letter about Antolik’s experiments and especially about one of his textbooks, but the prominent Austrian physicist of the time, Ernst Mach (1838–1916), was interested in some of the papers of the Košice high school teacher in the journal Poggendorffs Annalen der Physik und Chemie and came to some significant insights as a result of these. Antolik also often wrote popular articles on astronomy, atmospheric electricity, sound sequences, etc. As a gym teacher, he considered regular physical exercise for young people important and he himself compiled gymnastics exercises for his students, who were very successful at the national gymnastics competition in Budapest in 1901. He also summarized these in a book (Magyar ifjúsági játékok, 1903), which was also published in German. He also took a role in public life. Already during his time in Arad, he initiated weekly lectures on natural sciences, and the Arad Kölcsey Association grew out of this. In Bratislava, he also regularly gave educational lectures in the Toldy Circle. For nearly 11 years, he was also the president of the natural sciences department of the Bratislava Medical and Natural Sciences Association.