The Institute celebrated its 75th anniversary in 1994. Its story began with the life-work of Eötvös Loránd, physics professor at the Budapest University of Sciences.

In the 1880s he had studied Earth's gravity field and this led him to torsion balance experiments which he backed by computations. His first instrument, built to detect the spatial alteration of gravity field, had been completed in 1890, and then tested on Mount Ság, Hungary. As a result of further laboratory and field test, the first "field" torsion balance was produced, and it was awarded a prize at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris.

Eötvös and his research workers studied the correlation between the irregularities, that is anomalies of the gravity field, and the shape of buried geological structures. During the winter of 1901, survey results obtained on the ice-covered Lake Balaton led them to the conclusion that there was a mass-accumulation lying beneath the lake, between the towns of Tihany and Balatokenese.

The next milestone was the survey over an oil-field at Egbell in 1916, the place is known as Gbely in Slovakia today. The "gravity maximum" detected with the torsion balance clearly indicated the location of the anticline that contained mineral oil. This was the first survey for raw material in history.

From 1907 on, Eötvös's research team was receiving considerable funds, 60,000 crowns each year from the government, partly to finance their internationally renown research activity, and partly for the field surveys that aimed at discovering the deep structure of the Carpatian Basin. By the help of his results, Eötvös was able to convince the leaders of the nation's economy that in a country where the near-surface overburden was mainly constituted by young rocks in the geological term, oil-, water-, and ore-prospecting must be strongly based on geophysical methods. When Eötvös died in 1919, his fellows carried on research and development at the Eötvös Loránd Geophysical Institute which was the first applied geophysical research institute of the world.

Following World War I, ELGI's main lines of activity were the development of Eötvös torsion balance, and gravity and earth magnetic surveys. In the period before the Great Depression, torsion balance had been the primary tool in oil-prospecting: Hungarian-made Eötvös torsion balances were used in and ELGI's specialists worked in many countries. In the '30s, in addition to gravity and earth magnetic surveys, the Institute started seismic and geoelectric surveys and well-logging, with instruments chiefly developed in Hungary.

After World War II, ELGI could expand due to two favourable circumstances. On the one hand, this was the era when geophysical methods applied to raw material prospecting, primarily to oil-prospecting, were spreading world-wide. On the other hand, ELGI became one of the research centres of raw material prospecting in Hungary. Its exploration targets included the full range of raw materials along the whole depth scale. Keeping up with the pace of scientific and technological progress, ELGI strived at adopting every geophysical method.

After 1989, the changes that took place in both the domestic and international economy, rendered ELGI's position much more difficult. Practically every market for instrument development and production has been closed, and orders for raw material prospecting - coal, bauxite and mineral oil - fell back to a fraction of the previous volume. Although the tasks of ELGI that were related to public administration increased significantly, these could not counterbalance the above unfavourable trends.

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