Paul Mazalan

* Igló, May 29, 1891 – † Budapest, December 3, 1959 / mining engineer, geophysicist, hydrogeologist ; ; He obtained a mining engineer's diploma from the Mining and Forestry Academy in Selmecbánya in 1913. After a few months of internship in Nagybánya, he joined the Mining Research Office in Kolozsvár as a mining apprentice in the fall of 1913 and participated in the research of the then discovered Transylvanian natural gas fields, conducting torsion pendulum measurements. After the end of World War I, he was entrusted with the leadership of the Great Plain Mining Research Branch established in Debrecen. In 1920, he directed the research drillings in Budafaszta during the oil explorations around Nagykanizsa. In recognition of his ability and outstanding expertise, he was also entrusted with supervising the oil drilling in the South Sea Islands as a “field manager”. After that, in 1924–1926, he studied the production of deep drilling tools and equipment in the major oil fields, first in Australia and New Guinea, then in Japan and the USA. He returned to Hungary in 1927. From then on, he worked on domestically applying what he had experienced abroad and in 1932 he created the conditions for the production of tools for the Hungarian deep drilling industry and established the company Mazalán Pál Mélyfúrási Vállalata és Gépgyára, which was able to join the work of exploring domestic raw materials and drinking water within four years. From 1938, he was a lecturer in the department of “deep-bore wells” at the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture of the Budapest University of Technology, Department of Geology, until his death. In 1948, his company was nationalized and until 1949, he worked as an expert at the company, which was renamed the Deep-Bore Equipment Factory. In the summer of 1949, he joined the Mining Research Institute and worked there as a researcher until his death. ; ; His main works: ; Methods for the correct construction of deep-bore drinking water wells and the tasks related to this. Hungary's drinking water supply, 1940, ; New results achieved with the methods of deep hydraulics, 1953, ; Deep-bore wells (textbook), 1960.